Theatre’s new clothes
In her office, Nancy Hills is surrounded by costumes. As an associate professor and designer in the Utah State University theater arts department, those costumes are a big part of her job.
Hills said she has the best job in town, and the costumes she makes are meant to tell a story and define who the character is.
“We are storytellers,” Hills said. “That’s what theater is. My job is to visually personify that, and to show or hide who they are by how they look.”
She teaches several classes, including advanced courses and the history of clothing.
Hills said it is important to have a general knowledge of clothing and all of the rules, but it is also important to break all of those rules, she said.
Hills has been working at Utah State University for 17 years now. She said she got her master’s of fine arts from the University of Oregon in theater costume design.
She’s originally from the San Francisco Bay area and said she’ll be spending next year there while taking a sabbatical to “recharge her teaching battery.”
For her time off of teaching, she said she has a few things lined up. A few “design gigs,” research projects and possibly working at the San Francisco Opera, Hills said.
Hills said she has been fortunate enough to take students to Europe every summer for the last five years. They spend a month there, concentrating their time in England, and this year she is taking 19 students from USU.
Hills recently returned from a conference where she met a British designer, so she said she will be taking her students to see her work.
For the last four summers, Hills has taught theater costume design at University College Northampton in England.
Hills said the best part of her job is mentoring students and said she has had extraordinary students.
Her students have plenty of accomplishments. This year is the fifth year in a row that one of Hills’ students will take their work to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. The students are chosen out of a five-state region.
“I know it’s mostly them, but I help them,” Hills said. “They raise the bar for themselves.”
Right now, Hills is designing the costumes for two shows at the Lyric Theatre and said she is going to finish them both before she leaves for Europe this summer.
She said she loves theater and museums, but she isn’t an actress anymore. She said she used to be an actress and that was her undergraduate major, but now the only acting she does is in class.
Outside of the classroom, Hills has another hobby – her house.
She bought an old brick house to fix up and she said she is going to start remodeling the kitchen soon. The house was built in 1915 and will be an ongoing project until she moves out, Hills said.
“It’s got lovely arts and crafts details in it,” Hills said. “It just needed someone to take care of it.”
In addition to her house, Hills’ other hobbies include skiing in the winter and traveling in the summer, she said.
She has fraternal twin 15-year-old sons, but said people don’t even realize they are brothers sometimes.
“They’re like a box of puppies. It’s more like the square root of two,” Hills said. “They fight like dogs, but will always be each others’ best friend.”
Hills said she brings her twins on all of her trips now, so she has to find skateboard parks wherever they go. She said she has found one in Dublin and one is Stratford so far.
-hollyadams@cc.usu.edu
Nancy Hills works on a sketch of a costume design in the costume shop.