海伦·希尔 Helen Hill

Helen Hill (1970 - 2007) was an experimental animator, filmmaker, educator, artist, writer and social activist who lived her last years in New Orleans, Louisiana. A native of Columbia, South Carolina, Hill revealed her artist talents at an early age, making her first short animated Super 8 films when she was eleven. While studying English at Harvard (BS '92), she minored in Visual and Environmental Studies where she made three 16mm animated short films: Rain Dance, Upperground Show and Vessel. After receiving an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in Experimental Animation, Hill, along with her husband Paul Gailiunas, moved to his native Canada where he was studying medicine and where she continued to create films and teach film animation at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (now NSCAD University) and at the Atlantic Filmmakers Cooperative (AFCOOP). Soon after Hill and Gailiunas moved to New Orleans where Gailiunas would found a medical clinic for artists and low income patients and where Hill, meanwhile, co-founded the New Orleans Film Collective and taught filmmaking. Hills short films, including Bohemian Town (2004), Madame Winger Makes a Film: A Survival Guide for the 21st Century (2001), and Mouseholes (1999), have been screened at festivals all over the world and feature puppets, hand-drawn animation, found footage and original hand-processed film. She is also the author of a lavishly illustrated and self-published book called Recipes for Disaster, which compiles techniques for hand-processing film.