Lily Rose Thomas is a director working in music videos, short films and branded content.

Originally a photographer, Lily has always been drawn to creating a narrative, with dark self portraits and mysterious moments that give glimpses of a bigger story. After studying for a foundation at Chelsea School of Art, and a degree in English Literature at King’s College London, she pursued photography and has photographed for magazines including i-D and Wonderland, but after an exhibition of her work in 2014, a band saw the potential for her to move into video and since then the moving image has been her primary focus. Always narrative driven and often darkly comic, Lily is interested in dysfunctional, dark characters; videos she has created include the story of a young couple kidnapping an unsuspecting shopkeeper, rival children dueling in Suburbia, and a gold digging woman who murders her husband. Lily enjoys the process of street casting, but she has also worked on music videos with British actors including Perry Benson (This Is England) and Georgia Groome. Aside from music videos, she has created work for i-D magazine, including a short documentary about queer nightlife in London as part of their ‘Summer of Love’ series, as well as content for brands such as Adidas, Neutrogena and Bershka.

More recently, Lily has been working on short film projects. ‘A Short Film About Anxiety’, created for World Mental Health Day 2017, was a collaboration with director Stephen Isaac-Wilson, and was an exploration of how anxiety feels to those who suffer from it, blending intimately self shot iPhone interviews with chaotic, frenzied, fantasy elements of what an anxious episode might look like to someone experiencing it. ‘A Short Film About Anxiety’ won the online ‘VOTD’ competition, as well as the Art With Impact July 2018 Short Film Competition, and will be shown across college campuses in the USA.

This year, Lily has written and directed her first independent short, ‘Girls Who Drink’. The film explores three young women’s dysfunctional relationship to alcohol; portraying the complexity of their attitudes to drinking and the insidious subtlety of alcoholism – how it is often an innate sadness or emptiness, rather than a purposeful lack of control, that leads to drinking heavily.