About

“I’m interested in perception — in how the world looks depending on where you stand to see, and on what you’re looking for. I’m interested in representation — how the aesthetic portrayal of individuals and groups gives a picture of their “value” in society. I’m interested in language (words, images, movement) as a means to play with and affect perception and representation. With my intricate stories and metaphors, I aim to move audiences both intellectually and emotionally — to challenge them to think and feel about the complex ways in which we are implicated in each other’s stories, and in the larger society.”

“Eye of the Garden,” Art on the Beach, New York

A native of the French Louisiana countryside with a doctorate in Performance Studies from NYU, Lenora Champagne thrives on urban life but more frequently writes about the dramas of women and men who live away from cities, in a more direct relationship to nature.

Champagne’s plays and performance works have been produced and presented in New York City, around the U.S., and in Europe and Australia. In 2008, her play, TRACES/fades, a performance work about Alzheimer’s and our national inability to remember history, premiered at the Ohio Theatre in Soho after being developed at HERE Arts Center and 3LD with support from the NYSCA Individual Artists Program and a residency at Yaddo Artists Colony to work on the project. TRACES/fades is published in Plays and Playwrights 2009. Her performance writing has been published by Smith and Kraus and in Performing Arts Journal, Women and Performance Journal, Performance Research, Chain, The Iowa Review and in Out From Under: Texts by Women Performance Artists, among other publications. Champagne received a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in performance art in 2003, and with composer Daniel Levy, was a recipient of the 1999 Richard Rodgers Award as well as a 1998 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Playwriting. She has received three fellowships from the N.E.A., several grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, six MacDowell Colony residencies, and support from the Peg Santvoord Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and the Joyce Mertz Gilmore Foundation. Her work has been commissioned by Dance Theatre Workshop and Creative Time, among others. Through New Dramatists, she was the Sumner Locke Elliott Fellow to the Australian National Playwrights Conference (1997) and, with composer Daniel Levy, was the recipient of the 1998 Frederick Loewe Award in Musical Theater for The Singing.

Publications include Wants in Women & Performance Journal (1999); Getting Over Tom in Contemporary American Monologues for Women (TCG, 1997); and Isabella Dreams The New World (Smith and Kraus, 1993). Champagne is a member of PEN American Center and an alumna of New Dramatists, and teaches playwriting and performance at Purchase College/SUNY, where she is Kempner Distinguished Professor.