Helen Hill

Helen Wingard Hill (May 9, 1970 – January 4, 2007) was an American artist, filmmaker, writer, teacher, and social activist.

After the documentary filmmaker Stan Woodward visited her fifth-grade class, Hill 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 (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 was a native of Columbia, South Carolina, where she lived until graduating from Dreher High School in 1988.

She identified herself as a Southerner (although after marrying 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.

Hill began creating short animated films at age 11.

While at Harvard she made the 16mm animated short Rain Dance (1990) as well as two other animated films.

After graduating from Harvard, Hill and her Harvard Class of '92 classmate Paul Gailiunas, merely a close friend at the time, headed to New Orleans for the summer, drawn to the city's vibrant arts and music culture and its progressive social sensibility.

That summer they fell in love, and the couple married in Columbia, South Carolina, two years later.

Hill further developed her artistic work while completing her Masters of Fine Arts degree at California Institute of the Arts.

Hill earned her A.B. at Harvard University in 1992, where she majored in English and minored in Visual and Environmental Studies (the academic department housing filmmaking).

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).

In December 2000, the couple returned to New Orleans with their cat Nola and their pot-bellied pig Rosie, settling in the Mid-City district.

The couple lived in Halifax's culturally diverse but economically depressed North End (which she paid tribute to in her film Bohemian Town (2004)).

On October 15, 2004, Hill gave birth to their son, Francis Pop.

She continued to teach animation through the New Orleans Video Access Center (NOVAC) as well as the New Orleans Film Collective, which she co-founded.

In August 2005, Hill and family were temporarily displaced and lost most of their possessions due to the Hurricane Katrina levee failures, which flooded their Mid-City home, along with some 80% of the city.

They relocated to Columbia, South Carolina and stayed with family there for a year.

Hill persuaded her husband (in part by rallying friends in an ingenious postcard campaign) to move the family back to New Orleans in August 2006.

She continued to make films and engage in grassroots activism, which focused on rebuilding the city and the Faubourg Marigny neighborhood.

She was a visiting artist and teacher at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts at the time of her death.

In 2007, an unidentified intruder shot and killed her in her New Orleans home.

Her death (one of six murders in the city that day), coupled with the murder a week before of New Orleans musician Dinerral Shavers, sparked civic outrage.

Thousands marched against the rampant and continuing post-Katrina violence in New Orleans.

This "March Against Violence on City Hall" drew significant press coverage throughout the United States and beyond.

However, in the years following that tragic notoriety, Hill's life and creative work have been widely celebrated, with her films continuing to circulate to a degree they did not during her lifetime.

Hill was murdered at approximately 5:30 in the morning on January 4, 2007, by an unknown intruder in her home in the Faubourg Marigny neighborhood.

Her husband was shot three times and survived; their toddler son was uninjured.

Shortly beforehand, the intruder had apparently attempted to rob a bed-and-breakfast a few houses down the street.

Police were questioning the bed-and-breakfast's owners when they heard gunshots at Hill's house.

Hill's murder was one of a spate of killings in the first week of 2007 in New Orleans, prompting civic outrage that culminated in a march on City Hall on January 11, 2007, sometimes referred to as the March for Survival.

When her final film, The Florestine Collection, was released in 2011, curators and critics praised her work and legacy, describing her, for example, as "one of the most well-regarded experimental animators of her generation".

Hill's death at the age of 36 brought considerable media attention.

In 2012, Daniel Eagan wrote about Hill as one of "Five Women Animators Who Shook Up the Industry".

As of 2018, the New Orleans Police Department has made no arrest in the case, despite a $15,000 Crimestoppers reward being in effect for any information leading to an indictment.

The case has received extensive media coverage, including national radio, television, and print coverage in the United States and Canada.