Hillary Steel

Hillary Steel is a teacher and artist specializing in weaving and resist dyeing, incorporating ikat and plangi into her hand-woven wall pieces. Her work has been influenced by travels throughout Cote d'Ivoire, Peru, Chile and Mexico. Since 2006, along with colleague Virginia Davis, she has studied with and documented the work of Mexican master rebozo weaver Don Evaristo Borboa Casas, producing hand woven rebozos on a backstrap loom and making a short film about his work. Steel presents her textiles in a wide variety of venues, both national and international. They have been displayed at the North American Cultural Center in San Jose, Costa Rica; the American Consulate in Tijuana, Mexico; and at the United States Embassy in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Her textiles also have been the subject of solo shows at the McLean Project for the Arts, the Glenview Mansion Art Gallery, the Hoyt Institute of Fine Arts, and the Rosewood Centre Arts Gallery, and are included in the book Art on the Edge, Seventeen Contemporary American Artists published by the U.S. Department of State. Her work is held in private and public collections, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Renwick Gallery, Washington, D.C.

Steel has taught in public and private schools in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and, currently, at the Potomac School in Virginia. She has also led numerous “artist in residence” workshops in Pennsylvania and the Washington, DC, metropolitan area, creating site-specific collaborative textiles with students. Steel earned a BA from the State University of New York at Buffalo; studied textiles, studio art and art history via post-baccalaureate course work at Buffalo State College and the University of Pittsburgh; and received an MA in Teaching from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. She has been a resident of Montgomery County, MD, since 1994, and maintains a studio in Takoma Park, Washington D.C.