Nicholas Forrest Hill Bio: Nicholas Forrest Hill is an award-winning composer and filmmaker from Louisville, KY, known for his ethereal melodic music and atmospheric world-building. His 33-minute orchestral film suite Soul Flyer Pilot - inspired by an unfinished sci-fi story written by his late father - earned the Gold Prize in Original Composition at the 2024 Erik Satie International Music Competition. In 2025, the project also won Best Music Video at the Nyack Sci-Fi Horror Film Festival.

Hill’s filmmaking includes the award-winning short Good Boy, Fox, which received Best Zero Budget Sci-Fi at the 2025 Miami International Film Festival. His music has appeared in a wide range of media projects, including the documentary The Potter’s Field (2013), as well as work for clients such as Big Little Pictures and Five Guys Burgers and Fries. His debut self-titled solo album, released in January 2025, further established his voice as a genre-blurring composer.

Since 2014, Hill has been the lead vocalist, pianist, and songwriter for Phourist & the Photons, a group nominated for Best Avant Garde/Jazz at the 2017 Louisville Music Awards and winner of the 2022 Appalachian Arts & Entertainment Award for Best Pop. He has also directed numerous animated and live-action music videos that fuse storytelling and visual design. A juried member of the Kentucky Performing Arts Directory, Hill continues to develop immersive audiovisual work, including museum installations that integrate ambient orchestral music, film, and immersive visual environments.

Nicholas Forrest Hill Artist Statement: My father, Christopher Todd Hill, spent his life creating art - as a painter, illustrator, sculptor, and storyteller - and found success doing what he loved. Alongside that, he kept a personal project close at hand: a science fiction world he called Soul Flyer Pilot. Over time, that mysterious world became inseparable from how I understood him. As a child, I would mess around on the piano while he worked. Occasionally, I'd stumble on a melodic motif, and he'd stop, smile, and say, "Hey, can I use that for my story?"

He passed away in 2017. In missing him, I gathered those melodies and reimagined them as a full orchestral suite. At the time, I was new to orchestral writing. Learning to bring those themes to life with a full ensemble was intense, challenging, and deeply enriching. It felt like collaborating with him again - as if we were side by side, him painting or sculpting and me playing my tunes.

When I created a film for the music, I didn't try to retell his story - I never fully knew it. Instead, I made something new: a celebration of the wonder, imagination, and spirit of exploration he passed down to me.This immersive exhibit is a conversation between his art and mine, and a celebration of the creative and adventurous - this is Soul Flyer Pilot.

The works by my father featured here are called mat sculptures. Before making them, he was known for highly realistic paintings of dolphins and mountain landscapes. While they were working in a frame shop, he was encouraged by my mom to try something new and to move beyond realism.

Using materials from the shop, especially mat board, he began creating metallic tree silhouettes set against portals of otherworldly skies. These sculptures were part of the science fiction world he called Soul Flyer Pilot, though how they fit into that larger story was something only he fully knew.

By the time I was born, these pieces were already scattered throughout the house. They felt ordinary to me then. Only later did I understand how special they were. They have always been my favorite of his works. Their quiet magical realism places something familiar, like trees, into a fantastical world. That sensibility deeply influenced me and carries through my film for Soul Flyer Pilot, for example in moments where everyday objects become something more, like barcodes becoming sentient, growing wings and flying away.

Christopher Todd Hill Bio: Christopher Todd Hill was an award-winning artist from Louisville, KY, whose work appeared in numerous museums and galleries, including the Kentucky Artisan Center at Berea, the Artcraft Collection in Maryland, and the Kentucky State Capitol. A juried member of the Kentucky Crafted Arts Guild, Hill was also a 2006 Chesley Award nominee, recognizing his contributions to imaginative and fantastical art.

His illustration clients include Fantasy Flight Games, Cemetery Dance Publication and Pinnacle Books, among others. Hill was best known for his "mat sculptures" - metallic tree silhouettes suspended in glass, centered around luminous portals to iridescent skies - pieces that reveal their full depth and presence only when experienced in person.

He is survived by his wife, Cathy Hill - also an artist and juried member of the Kentucky Crafted Arts Guild - and his son, Nicholas Forrest Hill, award-winning composer and director.