An Artist’s Life: By Eleanora Antinova

Eleanora Antinova is the fictional alter ego of influential American performance artist, filmmaker, and installation artist Eleanor Antin. A black ballerina, Antinova is said to have danced with Sergei Diaghilev’s legendary Ballet Russes, but, despite her talent, she was never given her full due within an art form where the best roles were written for white bodies, where the premium was on youth, and where classicism continued to hold cultural authority over more modernist modes of art. Ultimately, because of these cruel realities, Antinova was forgotten. But the story of her tragic role as an outsider formed the basis for Antin’s art for nearly two decades, during which she embodied the part of the tragically overlooked ballerina, depicting her plight in a series of scripted and nonscripted works.With An Artist’s Life, Antin combines for the first time her fictional memoir of Antinova’s