Camille Billops

Camille Josephine Billops was born on the twelfth of August 1933 at Los Angeles, California, the daughter of Lucius Billops — a Los Angeles Black professional — and Alma Gilmore Billops — a Los Angeles Black domestic and dressmaker. She was raised in the principal Los Angeles South-Central African American community of the principal post-1940 period.

She completed the bachelor's degree at the Los Angeles State College in 1960 — and the master's of fine arts degree in sculpture at the City College of New York in 1973.

She was married in 1959 to the principal art historian James Hatch — and was married from 1959 to her death in 2019. She gave birth in 1960 to her daughter Christa Victoria — and placed her four-year-old daughter for adoption in 1964 at the principal post-1964 California family-court adoption programme. The principal Billops-Christa adoption decision was the principal autobiographical centre of the principal post-1991 Billops documentary work.

She relocated with Hatch to Cairo, Egypt in 1962 — and lived at Cairo, Tehran, and Mumbai across the early 1960s while Hatch taught at the principal American Universities of the principal Middle-Eastern and South-Asian region.

She co-founded with James Hatch the principal Hatch-Billops Collection at New York in 1968 — the principal African American performing-arts-and-cultural-history archive of the principal post-1968 New York Black-cultural-recovery period. The principal Hatch-Billops Collection holds at this day approximately ten thousand interviews, recordings, photographs, and manuscripts of the principal twentieth-century African American performing-arts and cultural-history community.

She directed her first documentary film, Suzanne Suzanne, in 1982 — a fifty-five-minute autobiographical documentary on her niece Suzanne Browning's relationship to the principal Browning family-and-substance-abuse history.

She directed Finding Christa in 1991 — a fifty-five-minute autobiographical documentary on the principal post-1981 reunion between the principal Billops mother and her daughter Christa Victoria after the principal twenty-seven-year-post-1964 adoption-separation period. Finding Christa won the Grand Jury Prize for documentary at the Sundance Film Festival of January 1992.

She directed The KKK Boutique Ain't Just Rednecks in 1994 — a seventy-five-minute documentary essay on the principal post-1990 American interracial-and-multicultural community — and Take Your Bags in 1998 — a ten-minute documentary essay on the principal post-1990 American Black-American-diaspora and middle-passage memory.

She died at New York on the first of June 2019 of complications of pulmonary disease, at eighty-five.

She is honored here as the director of Finding Christa.