Camille Billops

Camille Josephine Billops was born on the twelfth of August 1933 in Los Angeles, California, to Alma Gilmore Billops, a seamstress from South Carolina, and Lucius (Luscious) Billops, a cook from Texas. Her parents had migrated westward and worked in service for a Beverly Hills family, an arrangement that allowed them to send Camille to a private Catholic secondary school. She would later earn a bachelor's degree in California and a master of fine arts from the City College of New York.

Billops first made her name as a sculptor, ceramist, printmaker, and painter, but she is most honored today as a filmmaker of the Black diaspora. In 1982 she directed Suzanne, Suzanne, an unflinching portrait of her niece's recovery from addiction, made with her longtime collaborator and husband, the theater scholar James V. Hatch. In 1991 came Finding Christa, a searching autobiographical essay film about the daughter she had placed for adoption; it won the Grand Jury Prize for documentary at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival.

Her later films — Older Women and Love (1987), The KKK Boutique Ain't Just Rednecks (1994), Take Your Bags (1998), and A String of Pearls (2002) — continued her fearless practice of turning the camera on family, memory, and race. Together they stand among the principal autobiographical Black-American documentary essays of their era.

Beyond film, Billops was a devoted archivist. In 1968 she and Hatch founded the Hatch-Billops Collection, gathering thousands of books, more than a thousand recorded interviews, and nearly a thousand play scripts to preserve African American art and culture that others had neglected. She died on the first of June 2019 in New York City. May the record she saved, and the truths she dared to film, be honored for generations.