Our
Founder

Jerome Hill, the grandson of railroad builder James Jerome Hill and the son of Louis Warren and Maud Van Corlandt Hill, was born and grew up in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Manifesting an early interest in painting and drawing, Hill attended St. Paul Academy where, as a student, he decorated the walls of the chemistry laboratory with a series of historical murals which survive to this day. At Yale, he majored in music, creating costumes and sets for the Dramat (the undergraduate theater society) and drawings for The Yale Record (the campus humor magazine).

Jerome studied painting at the British Academy in Rome and at the Academie Scandinav in Paris. His paintings and drawings have been widely exhibited and are included in several private and public collections.

During the 1930s in Cassis, where he went every summer to paint, Hill developed his interest in filmmaking. Using one of the first Cine-Kodak-Specials, he created a series of films experimenting with the language of cinema. After returning to the United States, he made two film shorts released by Warner Brothers: Snow Flight (1938) and The Seeing Eye (1940).

He was also interested in still photography. Influenced by what he had learned as a student of Edward Weston, he undertook a photographic essay of a tour of Greece. This collection of stills was published in 1937 under the title Trip To Greece.

Jerome Hill served in Army served in Army film units and as a liaison officer with French forces in World War II.

With Erika Anderson as cinematographer, he produced and directed a film short, Grandma Moses which was nominated for an Academy Award, and a feature length documentary, Albert Schweitzer, that received the Oscar for Best Documentary in 1957.

Dissatisfied with the narrow confines of documentaries, Hill made his first "story" film, The Sandcastle in 1959-60. Inspired by the ideas of C. G. Jung, it was a feature length, low-budget, comedy-fantasy in black and white with a dream sequence in color that introduced a novel form of stop animation.

Subsequent films included the full-length Open The Door, Schweitzer and Bach, and a number of short hand-painted animations—Anticorrida, Merry Christmas, The Artist's Friends and The Canaries. His full-length autobiographical film, Film Portrait, was selected as an outstanding Film of the Year for presentation at the 1972 London Film Festival and won the Gold Dukat Prize at the 21st Annual Film Festival in Mannheim.

Throughout his life an avid student and creator of music, Hill majored in music composition at Yale. His interest in later years was the composition of works for the harpsichord and small orchestra. In the late 1960s, Hill began to compose the scores for his films.