His friend and photographer Steven Townshend called him "the heart of Chicago theater," and for decades Billy Bullion earned that description from a storefront stage rather than a marquee. Bullion, a Chicago-based director, actor and writer, died in Chicago on September 24, 2026, the Chicago Tribune reported. He was 63.

He joined the ensemble of The Factory Theater in 2016, arriving with a resume built at Akvavit Theatre, where he had directed the U.S. premiere of Andri Snaer Magnason's Blue Planet and the Midwest premiere of Jon Fosse's A Summer's Day, and where he wrote and directed the burlesque satire Pippi's Lost Stockings: A Skirt Raiser. A graduate of UCLA's School of Theater, Film and Television, he split his Factory years between directing, including the world premiere comedy Born Ready, and acting, turning up in a bathrobe for League of Awesome, a kilt for Jenny & Jenni and grandmother drag for Hotel Aphrodite.

Bullion also spent years training other directors. In February 2017, PerformInk reported his appointment as artistic director of DirectorsLabChicago, succeeding founding director Elizabeth Margolius. "The mission of DirectorsLabChicago is near and dear to my heart," he said at the time. "I'm looking forward to providing quality experiences and resources for all levels of the Chicago directing community."

His longest creative partnership was with writer Sid Feldman. Together they built The Conspirators, a Chicago performance collective for which Bullion directed the 2016 political satire The Resistible Rise of Herr Helmut Drumpf and, two years later, The Deckchairs, or Make the Titanic Great Again.

The partnership kept its edge into its final years. Previewing 2024's Viva la Mort, a rare turn toward narrative drama, Feldman noted, "While most of our recent work has been clearly political and satirical in nature, this piece appears on the surface to be more of a traditional narrative," and Bullion promised audiences, "I mean, you WILL laugh, but you may also cry or be terrified!" A year later, directing the company's stage version of the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup at the new Stars and Garters venue, Feldman said the pair, according to BroadwayWorld, "just wanted to do something fun this time, pure comedy without the commentary," while Bullion joked that the show would "TOTALLY take our mind off of our national decline and get our minds onto Freedonia's national decline."

What persists is concrete: the ensemble seat he held at The Factory Theater, the emerging directors who came through DirectorsLabChicago under his leadership, and The Conspirators, the satirical company he spent years building show by show with Sid Feldman and which continues to stage new work in Chicago's storefronts.