Claudia Hill

Claudia Hill is an interdisciplinary artist, based in Berlin. Her work engages in performance art, costume- and stage design, experimental film, visual art and sense-driven (somatic) form. Her practice has been presented internationally from Paris Internationale art fair to Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Les Rencontres Internationales film festival, Centre Pompidou, ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe and HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin. Born in Germany, Hill comes from a background of tailors of Czech origin on her mother's side. In 1993, she moved to New York to study contemporary dance. Shortly after, she enrolled in the continued education programs of The Parson's School of Design and Fashion Institute of Technology. At the same time, she began to work as a costume designer and was admitted to United Scenic Artists of America in 1997. Sparked by her first journey to Japan, she founded her own fashion labels, Claudia Hill and The Number After 10. In 2008 she returned to Europe and now lives in Berlin. Here she focuses on her art projects, continues to work with textiles as a costume and stage designer, while deepening her personal research in yogic traditions and studies of expanded consciousness. These cross currents have led her to develop a unique style of performative and playful multi-sensory experiences. Hill's work developed from a career in fashion, presenting her collections between New York, Japan, and Europe from 1998 to 2011. Her unconventional New York Fashion Week shows took on the form of performances, film screenings or installations in collaboration with e.g. Asymptote Architecture, the musician Skúli Sverrisson or the photographer Ariko Inaoka. Her label Claudia Hill was distributed in Japan and her pieces were sold at Barneys New York and other high-end stores around the world, as well as her own shop in Berlin. As her designs expanded beyond the boundaries of the fashion industry, she created costumes for choreographer William Forsythe and The Wooster Group and became a frequent collaborator of choreographer Meg Stuart.