Helen Hill (May 9, 1970 – January 4, 2007) was an American animation filmmaker and social activist who lived in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Helen Hill was a native of Columbia, South Carolina, where she lived until graduating from Dreher High School in 1988. She identified herself as a Southerner (though after marrying her husband Paul Gailiunas, a Canadian citizen originally from Edmonton, Alberta, she later became a dual US-Canadian citizen), and had deep roots in her home city of Columbia. Her mother, Becky, named her Helen Wingard Hill after her own mother, Helen Addison Wingard, another Columbian.
Helen Hill began creating short animated films at age eleven. After the documentary filmmaker Stan Woodward visited her fifth-grade class, she made a stop-motion Super 8 film that she entitled The House of Sweet Magic (1981). Made on a tabletop at home, it shows a toy dinosaur attacking a gingerbread house. That same year she and her classmates (Shack Allison, Kevin Curtis… read more
Helen Hill (May 9, 1970 – January 4, 2007) was an American animation filmmaker and social activist who lived in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Helen Hill was a native of Columbia, South Carolina, where she lived until graduating from Dreher High School in 1988. She identified herself as a Southerner (though after marrying her husband Paul Gailiunas, a Canadian citizen originally from Edmonton, Alberta, she later became a dual US-Canadian citizen), and had deep roots in her home city of Columbia. Her mother, Becky, named her Helen Wingard Hill after her own mother, Helen Addison Wingard, another Columbian.
Helen Hill began creating short animated films at age eleven. After the documentary filmmaker Stan Woodward visited her fifth-grade class, she made a stop-motion Super 8 film that she entitled The House of Sweet Magic (1981). Made on a tabletop at home, it shows a toy dinosaur attacking a gingerbread house. That same year she and her classmates (Shack Allison, Kevin Curtis, Cissy Fowler, Brannon Gregg, and Creighton Waters, assisted by Susan Leonard of the South Carolina Arts Commission and teacher Penelope Rawl) made another Super 8 movie as part of a statewide filmmaking-in-the-classroom initiative. Quacks, a live action film with a musical track recorded separately on audiocassette tape, is a comic vignette featuring a person in a duck costume interacting with school children at their bus stop.
Hill earned her B.A. at Harvard University in 1992. While majoring in English, she also minored in Visual and Environmental Studies, the academic department housing filmmaking. While at Harvard she made the 16mm animated short “Rain Dance” as well as two other animated films.
After graduating from Harvard in 1992 Hill and fellow Harvard ‘92 classmate Paul Gailiunas — merely a close friend at the time—headed to New Orleans for the summer, drawn to the Big Easy’s vibrant arts and music culture, and progressive social sensibility. That summer they fell in love, and Hill and Gailiunas were married in Columbia, SC two years later.
Hill further developed her artistic work while completing her Masters of Fine Arts degree at California Institute of the Arts. Upon her graduation from CalArts in 1995, she moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada where Gailiunas was attending Dalhousie University Medical School. Hill 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). Hill and Gailiunas lived in the Halifax’s culturally-diverse but economically-depressed North End (which is paid tribute to in her 2004 film Bohemian Town).
On December 17, 2000, the couple returned to New Orleans with their cat Nola and their pet pot-bellied pig Rosie, settling in the Mid-City district. On October 15, 2004, Hill gave birth to their son, Francis Pop.
Hill continued to teach animation through the New Orleans Video Access Center (NOVAC) and through the New Orleans Film Collective, which she co-founded with other members of the local film community.
Hill and family were temporarily displaced and lost most of their possessions in August 2005 due to the Hurricane Katrina levee failures which flooded their Mid City home along with some 80% of the city. She relocated to Columbia, South Carolina for a year where the family was in the company of relatives. Despite the slow rebuilding process in the post-Katrina months, she persuaded her husband to return to New Orleans with their son. She continued both her art and her activism, which was focused on helping local grassroots endeavors aimed at rebuilding the city. She was a visiting artist at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. —Wikipedia
