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Kristin Thompson (born 1950) is a prominent film theorist and author. She holds an honorary fellowship in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She was granted a master's degree in film studies at the University of Iowa (1973) and a Ph.D. in film studies at Wisconsin.

Thompson is married to David Bordwell, with whom she has written two textbooks: Film Art: An Introduction and Film History. Film Art, currently in its eighth edition (2006), was originally published in 1979 and has become a standard in the field of film aesthetics. To date, it has been translated into seven languages.

Although Thompson has a variety of research interests, she predominantly relies on an analytical method drawn from Russian Formalism and known as neoformalism. This method formed the basis for her dissertation, which subsequently became her first scholarly book, titled Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible: A Neoformalist Analysis.