In this paper we deal with a nonlinear interaction problem between an incom-pressible viscous fluid and a nonlinear thermoelastic plate.The nonlinearity in the plate equation corresponds to nonlinear elastic force in various physically relevant semilinear and quasilinear plate models.We prove the existence of a weak solution for this problem by con-structing a hybrid approximation scheme that,via operator splitting,decouples the system into two sub-problems,one piece-wise stationary for the fluid and one time-continuous and in a finite basis for the structure.To prove the convergence of the approximate quasilin-ear elastic force,we develop a compensated compactness method that relies on the maximal monotonicity property of this nonlinear function.