LARRY BILLMAN

Larry Billman began his professional career in The Boy Friend at the Ivar Theatre in his hometown of Hollywood. After 15 years of film, television, stage and nightclub performances, he made the transition to writer/director and began a career with Disney live entertainment, creating hundreds of shows for their theme parks around the world, eventually serving as director of entertainment for the opening of Tokyo Disneyland in 1983. In 1986, he was invited to "run away and join the Circus" and staged 6 editions of Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus and co-directed 4 editions of Disney on Ice. He then began a free-lance career as creative director to five non-Disney theme parks in Japan and continues to oversee live productions for Disney, most recently the opening of Tokyo DisneySea in 2001 and Tokyo Disneyland's 20^th Anniversary in 2003.

As an avocation, he began writing books for Greenwood Press about the dancing performers who had inspired him (Fred Astaire and Betty Grable) which led to Film Choreographers and Dance Directors, published by McFarland & Co. - the first encyclopedia detailing the artists who made the movies "move." He is currently writing Film Dancers, the companion book. In 1998, he founded The Academy of Dance on Film, a nonprofit research center in Hollywood, which gathers and shares printed and visual material to document the history and honor the movement makers in commercial film, television and music video. With education as a major activity of DOF, he lectures on "Dance in Film" at UC Irvine, CSU Long Beach, USC, Scripps College, San Diego State and other middle schools, colleges and universities.

He is a member of the SSDC and is the grateful recipient of an annual "Special" Award from ASCAP for being the director and co-author of The Hoop Dee Doo Review, a dinner theatre show which has been performed nightly at Walt Disney World since 1974. He is currently living in Japan and working as Entertainment Director for Tokyo DisneySEA.