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Alexandra Billings is an actress, singer, author, teacher and activist.
Currently, Ms Billings plays Davina on Amazon's Emmy and Golden Globe Award winning hit TV show "Transparent". In 2005, Ms. Billings played Donna, opposite Katherine Heigel, in the ABC film “Romy and Michelle: A New Beginning.” It was the second time a transgender actress played a transgender character in the history of television. She's had guest starring roles on "How To Get Away With Murder", “Grey's Anatomy,” “Eli Stone," “E.R.,” “Karen Sisco,” “Nurses” opposite Lynn Redgrave, and playing opposite Dot Jones in the Ryan Murphy pilot “Pretty/Handsome,” co-starring Blythe Danner and Robert Wagner. She finished her first feature film role as a non Trans character in "Valley of Bones" in the spring of 2016.
Alexandra has been acting since 1968 and has performed across the United States in hundreds of plays and musicals. She's played everyone from Mama Rose in “Gypsy,” to Mrs. Lynde in “A Doll House.” Most every stage role is considered to be a first for a transgender actress. Her one-woman autobiographical show, “Before I Disappear,” toured from Chicago to Boston to Los Angeles, and finally off Broadway at The Producer's Club, winning rave reviews and running for over 10 years. She originated the role of Alejandra in “Time to Burn” by Charles Mee at the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago and toured to off Broadway in Jeff Richmond and Michael Thomas' camp classic, “Hamlet! The Musical!” Her CD “Being Alive,” produced by Ralph Lampkin, Jr., was up for Grammy consideration in 2002.
She is the recipient of five After Dark Awards and one Joseph Jefferson Award.
Ms. Billings' activism stretches across the continent. She has won the TPA Award and the Rainbow Spirit Award, and she was inducted into the Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame in Chicago in 2007. Living with AIDS since 1995. Her life story “From Schoolboy to Showgirl,” produced by Alex Silets for PBS television, was nominated for an Emmy for Best Documentary.
Alexandra married her high school sweetheart Chrisanne Blankenship-Billings in 1996 in a ceremony held at the Bailiwick Theater in Chicago, and then recently, they were legally married, before the denial of Proposition 8, in Los Angeles in 2009. The couple lives in Long Beach, Calif. with their two cats, Tony and Marlene. Mrs. Alexandra Billings-Blankenship is the Viewpoints Associate at The Steppenwolf Theater and has taught Viewpoints in schools across the country since 1996. She is currently an Assistant Professor at California State University in Long Beach.