Katie Hillman

When it comes to the arts, Katie Hillman’s got it all. She can draw, she can paint, she can win national art competitions. In fact, this past summer, Hillman was chosen as one of only four artists to represent Nova Scotia at the Canada Games.
Hillman learned of the contest through a friend’s mother.
“It was like applying to a university,” Hillman says of the application process, which required a portfolio, resume, and reference letters.
About a month after applying, Hillman received a call informing her that she had been accepted to the Nova Scotia Art Team. As part of the Cultural Division, she had the chance to meet musicians, carvers, actors, painters, and sculptors from all across Canada. The Art Team had two weeks to combine their talents and create a production with the theme “The Seven Deadly Sins”, to be performed in front of 2,000 people.
Participating in the Canada Games is a wonderful achievement in a lifetime devoted to the arts. Hillman has loved art from an early age; she was drawing on walls and colouring anything else she could reach even as a toddler.
“My parents were very supportive,” she says, adding that they never discouraged her from making art her main focus.
This support certainly seems to have paid off. In Grade 7, a comic book she designed for a Ben’s Bread art contest won her a $4,000 scholarship. In Grade 8, she won the HRM Citizenship Award for Leslie Thomas Junior High School for her work as a Student Ambassador for Kids Help Phone, among many other things. That same year, she also won a computer for her work in Art Against Youth Violence. Hillman also plays clarinet in the school band and was accepted to the Nova Scotia Junior Wind Ensemble, no small achievement, in junior high.
Throughout high school, Hillman has taken numerous art courses, both in school and in her spare time. She’s designed murals for the Student Council Office, signs and brochures for the Youth Heath Centre, and completed numerous other works that have been displayed in art fairs everywhere in the province.
Hillman is now in her Grade 12 year at Sackville High School and plans to attend the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) after graduation.