Thomas W. Campbell became a member of the National Board of Review when his short experimental documentary Birth of the Sun was awarded a 2008 student grant. The film took an unusual look at an obscure but iconic artist named Grady Alexis, a Haitian painter and musician who lived on the streets of the East Village in the 1980's and represented the "do it yourself" culture of art that thrived at the time. Grady's life ended as the renaissance itself was coming to a painful close. Just before Mayor Giuliani began his crackdown on the artists and street people living in the squats and in Tompkin's Square Park, Grady was killed in a meaningless traffic scuffle with an off-duty policeman. Birth of the Sun, which tries to make sense of life amid the dynamic but short-lived art scene of the late 1980's, found success at numerous festivals and continues to screen at small art galleries and alternative venues throughout the city.

Thomas has edited many documentaries about artists in the last fifteen years, including Chuck Close, Faith Ringgold, Emma Amos, Romare Bearden, Jimmy and Max Ernst, Elisabeth Catlett, Red Grooms, Howardina Pindell, Jacob Lawrence, Bill Traylor, Grandma Moses, William Hawkins, Betye and Alison Saar, Robert Colescott, and Charles Burchfield. His interest in art was honed when he moved to New York City from a small town in Vermont during the 1980's and found himself caught up in the swirling stew of art and alternative East Village culture. He studied screenwriting at NYU and worked at the Bleecker Street and Carnegie Hall art house cinemas to continue his real film education. He produced and performed at famous alternative venues such as La Mama and The Kitchen, wrote and performed two CDs of rock and roll for Imaginary Films, and surprisingly never met Grady Alexis, though he imagines rubbing shoulders with him one night as they unknowingly passed each other on St. Marks Place. He has also written about film for American Cinematographer, The Off-Hollywood Report, and the now defunct Bleecker Street Cinema publication The Thousand Eyes of Cinema. In 2004 he edited the feature film Pulling, which has appeared in numerous festivals worldwide.

Since earning his Graduate Degree from City College in documentary filmmaking in 2008, Thomas has been teaching filmmaking, film theory and sound design at Hofstra and Adelphi Universities. He has also taught a career development class at the School of Visual Arts. He has two documentaries about artists in development–one about the socially conscious muralist Eva Cockroft, who passed away in 1991, and another about the metal sculptor Linus Brandt. Not surprisingly both were influential figures in the 1980's East Village art scene. He shot and edited the short film Saint Vitus Dance, directed by fellow NBR member Marianne Hettinger, and is working with her again to produce and shoot a documentary about award winning violinist Oscar Bohorquez. He has adapted his short film GIving Maury the Treatment into a play, which he plans to produce in the late summer of 2012. HIs future projects include another adaptation of his own work–expanding the short film West of Center into a feature length film script that he hopes to see produced in the summer of 2013.

Thomas is an active member of the National Board of Review and values the many talented and interesting people he has met in the organization. He credits the experience of attending numerous screenings and engaging in thoughtful and critical discussion with his own renewed interest in narrative filmmaking. He writes film reviews for the NBR website and occasionally leads post-film Q&A's with directors, writers, featured actors and producers.

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