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Lenora Champagne

Part-time Faculty
 lenoracha@aol.com
429 - 1 Wash Pl

Office Hours
 Tuesday 2:15-3:15

B.A., English, Louisiana State University, 1972
M.A., Drama, New York University, 1975
Ph.D., Performance Studies, New York University, 1980

Lenora Champagne is a playwright, performer, and director. From 1993-2000, she was a member playwright at New Dramatists. She has received numerous fellowships, awards, and commissions from The National Endowment for the Arts, The New York State Council on the Arts, The New York Foundation for the Arts, The Jerome Foundation, Yaddo, and The MacDowell Colony. She edited and contributed to Out From Under: Texts by Women Performance Artists (Theatre Communications Group, 1990) and has been published by Smith and Kraus, Performing Arts Journal, and The Iowa Review. She is Professor and Coordinator of Theatre and Performance at Purchase College, and lives in New York City with her husband and daughter. Her play, TRACES/fades is published in Plays and Playwrights 2009 and her essay on theatrical adaptations of The Scarlet Letter is published in Sharon Freidman's Feminist Theatrical Revisions of Classic Works. Her newest book is New World Plays (No Passport Press, 2015).        

Performances, Productions, Exhibitions & Releases

2023

Feeding on Light

Lenora Champagne’s play Feeding on Light, a play about philosopher Simone Weil, premiered at Undermain Theatre, Dallas, Texas. Champagne  received the inaugural commission from the Katherine Owens Fund for New Work.

Books

2015

New World Plays

Lenora Champagne's New World Plays was published by NoPassport Press.  

Teaching and Research Interests

performance art; directing; playwriting; creative writing; theatre history; women and performance 

Recent News

PERFORMANCES
 
Champagne’s play on Simone Weil, “Feeding On Light,” will receive its first public reading at the Undermain Theatre, in Dallas, Texas, and premiere there in Spring 2021.
 
Along with the composer Daniel Levy, Lenora Champagne co-wrote the libretto and lyrics forThe Singing, a cyberspace opera, which was was published in Epic Plays II, by No Passport Press (2018).
 
Champagne performed an excerpt from her new work, Traps, at The Chocolate Factory Theater in the performance development series, THROW, curated by Sarah Maxfield. She performed in the US premiere of Fernando Rubio's Everything By My Side, in the "Crossing the Line" festival, produced by PS122 and the French Institute/Alliance Francaise. The show was featured in The New York Times as well as on WNYC. She performed in the work in July 2015 in its production at Bard  College. Champagne performed in a reading of Khadijah Queen's play, Non-Sequitur, the prize-winning play of the Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers, directed by Fiona Templeton, at Manhattan's New Ohio Theatre.
 
AWARDS AND HONORS
 
Lenora Champagne was awaded a $10,000 commission from the Katherine Owens/Undermain Fund for New Work. The comissions supports the work of new play Feeding on Light, a collaboration that explores the life and influence of French philosopher Simone Weil.

Lenora Champagne was named a Fellow of the Brown Foundation at the Dora Maar House in Menerbes, France, in November 2019.
 
Champagne received a grant from Lower Manhattan Cultural Council/ NYC Dept. of Cultural Affairs to present her solo piece Traps, in public spaces and community centers in 2017.
 
PUBLICATIONS
 
Champagne contributed “Performing Archeology,” which includes an essay on Meredith Monk’s re-performance of the solo “Education of the Girlchild,” along with her own solo performance script, “Memory’s Storehouse,” was published in Issue 3: On Aging (& Beyond) of Performance Research, (vol. 24, no. 23, 2019). The work was also translated into Japanese and featured in Oi to Odori, edited by Nanko Nakajima and Kikuko Toyama (Tokyo: Keiso Shoboue, 2018).
 
Champagne translated In the Solitude of Cotton Fields, by Bernard-Marie Koltes, which was directed by Richard Murphet and produced at the La Mama Courthouse in Melbourne, Australia, on April 17-28 2019.
 
Champagne contributed a reflection on Caryl Churchill titled, “Disruptor and Provocateur,” for the second issue of PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, on May 1, 2019 (The MIT Press Journals, PAJ vol. 41, no. 2, pg. 35-37).
 
Champagne’s performance script, “Traps,” was included in Stages of Resistance: Theatre and Politics in the Capitalocene, edited by Caridad Svich and Olivia George (NoPassport Press, 2019).   



Courses

2023 Spring

Performing the Real: Solo and Alternative Performance

2022 Spring

Performing the Real: Solo and Alternative Performance

2021 Spring

Performing the Real: Solo and Alternative Performance

2020 Spring

Performing the Real: Solo and Alternative Performance

2019 Spring

Performing the Real: Solo and Alternative Performance

2018 Spring

Performing the Real: Solo and Alternative Performance

2017 Spring

Performing the Real: Solo and Alternative Performance

Lenora Champagne