Billy Shebar

Billy Shebar is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker and co-founder of 110th Street Films with producer David Roberts. The team created Trump Bites (2018), a series of short animated films based on actual Trump audio clips, hand-drawn by two-time Academy Award nominee Bill Plympton. The first three episodes premiered on the New York Times web site in June 2018 and went viral, garnering over 10 million views, and won the Webby Award for Best Animated Series. Shebar helped develop Dark Net (2016), the documentary series on Showtime, writing and producing two of the eight episodes in its first season; and produced Gone: The Forgotten Women of Ohio (2017), an eight-hour documentary series on Spike, with Academy Award nominee [link+nm0075666]. Other TV credits include Nicky and Wynton: The Making of a Concerto (2016) for the BBC; America by the Numbers with Maria Hinojosa (2014), and History Detectives (2003) for PBS; King Tut Unwrapped (2010) for Discovery; The First 48 (2004) for A+E; and Boston's Finest (2013) for TNT. Shebar has also written several narrative features, including Dark Matter (2007), starring Meryl Streep and Liu Ye. Dark Matter won the Alfred P. Sloan Prize at Sundance, and was screened Lincoln Center's Film Comment Selects series. The New York Times called it "a movie of ideas that does an exemplary job of translating scientific speculation into layman's language," and TV Guide called it a "hypnotic, culturally pertinent drama." Shebar collaborated with composer Meredith Monk on video projections for Magic Frequencies (1999), and with visionary architect Lebbeus Woods on Timesquare (1989), a series of videos broadcast on PBS. His short comedy Guts (1995) starred Kristen Johnston, and was broadcast on public television's New York Independents. Shebar has created many films for nonprofits, including the Robin Hood Foundation, the Rainforest Alliance, the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation, Columbia University, and the New Press. In 2007, he traveled to Uganda as producer and mentor to four young filmmakers to create Shooting for Peace for the Jacob Burns Film Center. Shebar is a summa cum laude graduate of Harvard College and a Marshall Scholar.