Champagne, Lenora

Lenora Champagne (www.lenorachampagne.com) came to New York from Louisiana to be a painter, but found her voice in performance. Since receiving her Ph.D. in Performance Studies from NYU in 1980, Champagne has been making work as a performance artist, playwright, and director. She received a NYFA Fellowship in Playwriting in 1998 and a NYFA Fellowship in Performance Art in 2003. Champagne has been awarded three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (in solo performance, directing, and an artist's residency in Canada); recieved commissions and project support from NYSCA, DCA, the Peg Santvoord Foundation, the Joyce Gilmore Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, the Puffin Foundation, the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art, among others; and has been in residence at the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. Her work in galleries and arts spaces such as Franklin Furnace, the New Museum, and Creative Time's Art on the Beach is mostly live performance, though she also co-created an installation for the New Museum's Art Mall as Social Space show in 1992, and wrapped babies in words for Shattered Anatomies, a box anthology of objects and texts on performance, Arnolfini, 1997. Champagne frequently collaborates with sculptors, installation artists, and media artists. She is an alumna of New Dramatists, a former resident HARP artist at HERE Arts Center (where she developed TRACES/fades, an intergenerational performance with music and video that is a meditation on memory, loss, and our national inability to remember history), and is Professor of Theatre and Performance at Purchase College, SUNY. Champagne edited and contributed to Out From Under: Texts by Women Performance Artists (Theatre Communications Group, 1990); her publications include performance texts, plays and essays published by Smith & Kraus, Performing Arts Journal, Performance Research, Plays and Playwrights 2009 and The Iowa Review.

From the guide to the Lenora Champagne Papers, 1984 - 1991, (© 2010 Fales Library and Special Collections)