BILL MEGALOS began working professionally in the theater in New York in 1972 as a stagehand at the Metropolitan Opera House. He became a lighting designer and stage manager, eventually stage managing the national tours of "Godspell" and "Ain't Misbehavin'" as well as the Eliot Feld Ballet company and Nikolais Dance Theatre. As a concert lighting designer he worked with artists as diverse as Duke Ellington, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, Aerosmith and The Beach Boys. In the early 1990's he designed the architectural and entertainment lighting for the 43 acre amusement park ASIAN VILLAGE in Singapore.
Since 1976, he has been involved in all aspects of film and television production, from producing the comedy feature "Mutants in Paradise" to directing music videos. He apprenticed with renowned Greek director Theo Angelopoulos on his film “O Megalexandros” (“Alexander the Great”) which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1980. Megalos was cameraman on numerous documentaries, including "Aretha," "Paris is Burning," and the Emmy Award-winning "W. Eugene Smith" with Peter Riegert for American Masters, "A Night in Havana-Dizzy Gillespie in Cuba," the PBS series "Quest for the Killers" and "Legendary Trails," as well as the Academy Award-winning "Down and Out in America," directed by Lee Grant.
Megalos' work as a director ranges from commercials and music videos to dramatic films. His biography of Jack Benny for HBO was awarded the Cine Golden Eagle Award. His series of distinctive network promos for CBS ran throughout the year of 1996. As a director or cameraman, Megalos filmed over 30 full-length documentaries for PBS, BBC and Channel 4 (UK) in more than 20 countries. His series of family planning mini-dramas in Bengali won the World Health Organization's Global Award for Media Excellence in Beijing in 1985. He produced and directed the ground-breaking half-hour infomercial that funded Jerry Brown's 1992 Presidential campaign. In 2004 he was a director on the DVD for the extended edition of “Return of the King,” the final Lord of the Rings film. For the past ten years, he has been making social documentaries and working as a media consultant for the Asian Development Bank, a large N.G.O. whose aim is the reduction and elimination of poverty in Asia. He spent two years traveling with Muhammad Yunus, 2006 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, for a feature documentary on microfinance, “To Catch A Dollar,” which premiered at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival.
Megalos has a B.A. in anthropology and comparative literature from Columbia University where he studied with Margaret Mead. He also assisted Alan Lomax at that time. He was awarded an M.F.A. from Columbia as well and taught theater there at the graduate School of the Arts. He taught film at the School of Visual Arts in New York City for four years and is currently on the faculty of the University of Southern California and the Maine Media Workshops (formerly the International Film and Television Workshops) in Rockport, Maine. He was the Vice President of Production and Director of Programming at The Recovery Network, a cable television, internet, and radio network, from its inception in May of 1996 until December of 1998. In his time there, he created six television series and produced 120 hours of programming. He created the company logo and the network look and was involved in the creation of the company’s website. In the early 1970’s he worked as a gold miner at the Homestake Mine in the Black Hills of South Dakota.
