Sandra Billington is an academic, author and actress who was first a lecturer and then a reader in Renaissance Theatre at the University of Glasgow between 1979 and 2003. She became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1998. She is a graduate of the University of Cambridge. She is most noted for her work A Social History of the Fool which, in 1984, won the Folklore Society's Katharine Briggs Folklore Award.