Board Member
Bill is a native of Brooklyn, and attended Brooklyn College, earning degrees in Fine Arts, Art History and Art Education. He studied under the great painter Philip Pearlstein.
For the past 26 years Bill has been an Associate Professor of Animation History at the School of Visual Arts, having previously taught at Pratt Institute and Parsons/The New School. His classes include both U.S. and International Animation, and for the past five years he instituted a course on “Women in Animation”, the first offering of its kind.
He is an ASIFA-East member for the past 48 years, joining the Board in 1981, and edited the newsletter for a decade, bringing it from a two-page flyer to a ten-page monthly, then evolving it to a wraparound with the title aNYmator.
He has programmed many of the most popular programs, including career retrospectives of Shamus Culhane and, in 1988, the Evening with Lillian Friedman Astor, the first woman animator, which was the largest ASIFA program, with standing room only in NYU’s amphitheater. For that event he published the Lillian Friedman Astor Index, the only scene-by-scene animation index of any classical studio animator. In 1989 he published the 20th Anniversary Index of the ASIFA–East Festival Winners, a real task since no one Board member had saved a complete list of the yearly winners. Ten years later, he supplied the listings for a 30-year Index.
As an animation archivist, Bill owns one of the largest collections of animated films in 16mm and 35mm, with a current, in-progress inventory totaling over 3400 titles, with a special emphasis on rare and obscure titles. His animation print library includes hundreds of books and magazines of the 20th century to the present, from countries all over the world.
A freelance artist for many years, his work in animation includes the 1979–1981 Christmas Seals TV spots, which included animation and backgrounds on the very popular Norman Rockwell stamp commercial. Other work includes projects for Scholastic and Burger King and, together with animation by veteran Joe Oriolo, the backgrounds on the titles for a 1983 live action FELIX THE CAT TV program.