Lenora Champagne Papers
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Abstract
Lenora Champagne is a performance artist, playwright, and director. The Lenora Champagne Papers (1969-2023) is comprised of video footage of numerous performances by Lenora Champagne between 1984-1991. The collection also contains project files, drafts of plays and manuscripts, original writings, photographs, correspondence, posters, Fulbright scholarship and conference materials, teaching and employment materials related to Purchase College, journals, and appointment books.
Biographical Note
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.
Arrangement
Materials in Series I: Video are arranged alphabetically. Materials in Series II: 2024 Accretion have not been arranged by an archivist; the materials are arranged in the order in which they were received from the donor.
Scope and Content note
The Lenora Champagne Papers (1969-2023) is comprised of video footage of numerous performances by Lenora Champagne between 1984-1991. The collection also contains project files, drafts of plays and manuscripts, original writings, photographs, correspondence, posters, Fulbright scholarship and conference materials, teaching and employment materials related to Purchase College, journals, and appointment books. The project files document Champagne's artistic projects, including art installations, plays.
Subjects
Conditions Governing Access
Materials are open without restrictions.
Conditions Governing Use
This collection is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use materials in the collection in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).
Preferred Citation
Identification of item, date (if known); Lenora Champagne Papers; MSS 153; box number; folder number; Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries.
Audiovisual Access Policies and Procedures
Audiovisual materials have not been preserved and may not be available to researchers. Materials not yet digitized will need to have access copies made before they can be used. To request an access copy, or if you are unsure if an item has been digitized, please contact Fales Library and Special Collections, special.collections@nyu.edu, 212-998-2596 with the collection name, collection number, and a description of the item(s) requested. A staff member will respond to you with further information.
About this Guide
Processing Information
Decisions concerning description and physical interventions taken on the collection prior to 2024 were not recorded. In February 2024, an accretion was rehoused in archival boxes. Some items were placed in folders. The accretion was inventoried on the box-level. All metadata was recorded before the binders were discarded. The accession number associated with this accretion is 2024-013.
