Alexandra Billings

Alexandra Scott Billings, born March 28, 1962, in Illinois, is an American actress, singer, and teacher. Of European American, African American, and Native American ancestry, Billings grew up in a household shaped by the arts; her father, Robert Billings, worked as a music teacher at Los Angeles Harbor College and served as musical director for the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera. That environment drew her toward theater early, and she worked backstage alongside Carol Burnett and Yul Brynner. She also performed in productions of Jesus Christ Superstar and The Roar of the Greasepaint—the Smell of the Crowd. In her early adult years, Billings experienced homelessness and struggled with cocaine and opioid addiction, and for a period engaged in sex work. She began her gender transition in 1980 and has been living with HIV since 1985.

In the early 1980s, Billings performed under the name Shanté at the Baton Show Lounge in Chicago, where she impersonated Barbra Streisand, Judy Garland, and Liza Minnelli. During that period she won a series of beauty pageant titles, including Miss Wisconsin, Miss New York, Miss Chicago, Miss Illinois, and Miss Florida, and later served as a judge of the Miss Continental pageant in 2000 and 2001. Much of her subsequent stage career was built in Chicago, at venues including The Bailiwick Theater, Light Opera Works, Court Theatre, and Steppenwolf Theatre. She collaborated on plays with writers Larry Kramer, Tina Landau, and Jamie Pachino, and performed in two Billy Bermingham-written satirical farces at the Torso Theatre during the 1990s — Shannen Doherty Shoots a Porno: A Shockumentary and Cannibal Cheerleaders on Crack — starring in the latter. Her work in Chicago theater earned her one Joseph Jefferson Award and five After Dark Awards. She also served as a former artistic associate of About Face Theatre.

Billings is a professional singer who has performed in theaters and nightclubs across the United States. She recorded her second CD, The Story Goes On, in 2003, and received the New York MAC Hanson Award for Cabaret Artist of the Year in 2004. Her one-person autobiographical show, S/He and Me, toured to Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and off-Broadway.

Her Broadway career spans 2003 to 2018 and includes two notable credits. In fall 2018, she appeared in The Nap at Manhattan Theatre Club, making her one of the first openly transgender people cast in a trans role on Broadway. In September 2019, it was announced that Billings would play Madame Morrible in the Broadway musical Wicked, becoming the first openly transgender person to star in the production. Following the closure of Broadway during the COVID-19 pandemic, she appeared alongside other performers on Good Morning America in fall 2021 to announce the return of several shows, including Wicked. She resumed the role of Morrible when the production reopened in September 2021 and remained in the show through January 30, 2022.

On television, Billings portrayed one of the first openly transgender characters on American TV in the 2005 film Romy and Michele: In the Beginning. She went on to play transgender characters in episodes of Karen Sisco, ER, Eli Stone, Grey's Anatomy, and How to Get Away with Murder, where she appeared in season two as Professor Jill Hartford. In 2018, she played recurring character judge Martha Wallace in the second season of Goliath. She gained wider recognition through her recurring role as Davina in the Amazon series Transparent, a character introduced in season one in 2014 who appeared throughout the series, including its feature-length Musicale Finale. From 2020, she appeared in a recurring role as Robin, a transgender supervisor and mentor to Darlene Conner, on ABC's The Conners. She also held a recurring role as Inspector Ainsley Lowbeer in the 2022 Amazon Prime Video science fiction series The Peripheral. Her 2023 film Queen Tut earned her a Canadian Screen Award nomination for Best Lead Performance in a Comedy Film at the 12th Canadian Screen Awards in 2024. In 2009, Chicago PBS affiliate WTTW produced a documentary about her life and career titled Schoolboy to Showgirl: The Alexandra Billings Story, which aired nationally on PBS stations and is frequently rebroadcast during Pride Month.

Billings has maintained a parallel career in education. She has taught Viewpoints, a theater method, at the Steppenwolf Summer School, and has held teaching positions at Lewis University, the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois, Act One Studios, and the Steppenwolf School West in Los Angeles. She earned her MFA from California State University, Long Beach, where she also served as an assistant professor and delivered the commencement address for the College of the Arts in 2015. She currently holds a position as a theater professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

An AIDS and LGBTQ activist, Billings received the Human Rights Campaign Visibility Award in 2016. In 2017, she accepted the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Comedy Series on behalf of the Transparent cast. She has been chosen as Grand Marshal for the Chicago Pride Parade, serving in that role on June 28, 2009. Billings lives in Hollywood, California, with her wife Chrisanne, whom she first met at age fourteen in drama class; the two were married in a commitment ceremony in Chicago on December 4, 1995.