Also known as William Roscoe Leake
American dancer (1961-2006)
Willie Ninja (April 12, 1961 – September 2, 2006) was an American dancer and choreographer best known for his appearance in the documentary film Paris is Burning. Ninja, who was gay, was a fixture of ball culture at Harlem's drag balls who took inspiration from sources as far-flung as Fred Astaire and the world of haute couture to develop a unique style of dance and movement. He caught the attention of Paris is Burning director Jennie Livingston, who featured Ninja prominently in the film. <a h
5 total works indexed
· 2009 · cited 2,419x
· 2005 · cited 1,854x
· 2007 · cited 1,599x
· 2000 · cited 1,499x
· 1992 · cited 1,383x
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Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).