CAMILLE BILLOPS

Known as a filmmaker, Camille Billops has produced and directed six film documentaries. Suzanne, Suzanne was chosen by the Museum of Modern Art for its New Directors Series in 1983. Finding Christa won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 1992. Her last film, A String of Pearls was chosen “premiere” film for the Planet Africa series at the Toronto Film Festival in 2002.

In 1975 Camille Billops, together with her husband, founded the Hatch-Billops Collection, Inc. an archives of African American cultural materials. This library has interviewed over 340 minority artists and published their lives and work in 24 annual journals of Artist and Influence.

Billops has exhibited at the Studio Museum of Harlem, as well as in Hamburg, Germany; Cairo, Egypt; Los Angeles and New York. She wrote and published The Harlem Book of the Dead, featuring the poetry of Owen Dodson and the photography of James Van Der Zee. In 2003 she lectured on the Bob Blackburn Printmaking Workshop at the Library of Congress.

Billops has received grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, The Rockefeller Fellowship in Filmmaking and the Skowhegan Award for contribution in the arts. This year she exhibited in the photo retrospective for Percent for Art Exhibition in NYC, at the Parsons School of Design, and was elected to the Advisory Board of WAAND—The National Directory of Women Artists Archives at Rutgers University at New Brunswick.