BIOGHIST REQUIRED Peggy Biderman was born Peggy Klyman in New York City in 1926. During the late-1950s she was a member of the pacifist Committee for Non-Violent Action, and participated in sit-ins and other civil rights activities in Florida, organized by the Congress for Racial Equality. Beginning in 1965, Biderman lived in the Chelsea Hotel in New York City, where she met and became close friends with painter and experimental filmmaker Harry Smith, Beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, visual artists Mary Beach and Claude Pelieu, musician and poet Patti Smith, and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Biderman also worked at the Museum of Modern Art. She lived at the Chelsea Hotel until the late-1970s, when she moved to San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood. She died of cancer in San Francisco at age 64 in July 1991.
From the guide to the Peggy Biderman Photographs of Gregory Corso, undated., (Columbia University. Rare Book and Manuscript Library)
