Camille Billops (1933-2019) was a Black artist, writer, archivist, and filmmaker who, along with husband James Hatch (1928-2020), founded the Hatch-Billops Collection in 1975 to collect and preserve pieces of African American cultural history. Billops was a polymath visual artist whose long career included works in poetry, sculpture, and printmaking, in addition to films such as Suzanne, Suzanne (1982) and The KKK Boutique Ain’t Just Rednecks (1994). Her autobiographical documentary Finding Christa (1991), about her experience meeting the adult daughter she had given up for adoption thirty years prior, won the Grand Jury Prize at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival. James Hatch was an educator and filmmaker who taught English and theater at the City College of New York. He directed several films from the 1950s through 1970s and often collaborated with Billops on her projects. Hatch was also a noted historian who published nearly a dozen books on African American theater.

The Hatch-Billops Collection was a personal archive that the couple accumulated over forty years, comprised of recorded interviews with Black artists, play scripts, handbills, photographs, and other artifacts. The bulk of their collection now resides at Emory University in Georgia and the City College of New York, but Hatch and Billops donated some of their film materials to the BFC/A in 1992. The collection mostly consists of film publicity materials such as press sheets, newspaper advertisements, and articles on films with Black performers. Included among these artifacts are advertisements for Blaxploitation era films from 1967-1975, as well as press sheets for early films distributed by Sack Amusement Enterprises, such as Oscar Micheaux’s Underworld (1937) and Son of Ingagi (1940), the first science-fiction/horror film with an all-Black cast. The collection also features materials related to the Billops’s documentary Finding Christa, such as photographs, programs, and publicity and review articles.

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