“EJ Hill continues to evolve at a rate that is not only deeply rooted in intellectual concerns and in dialogue with history and art history, but also with ongoing social concerns. His most current body of work brings in the specificity of his personal experience underlining, for example, problems in our public school and higher education systems, imagining alternative histories and modes of knowledge transmission to question the shortcomings in our cultural makeup as a nation.”

-Alma Ruiz

EJ Hill is an artist whose practice incorporates painting, writing, installation, and performance in ways that seek to elevate bodies and amplify voices that have long been rendered invisible and inaudible by oppressive social structures. This multifaceted approach often stems from an endurance-based performance practice in which Hill pushes his physical and mental limits as a way to expand the conditions, parameters, and possibilities that determine a body.

Hill’s work has been presented domestically and internationally in exhibitions including Rendez-vous/14th Lyon Biennale, Institut d’Art Contemporain, Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes, France (2017); Artists of Color, The Underground Museum, Los Angeles (2017); Future Generation Art Prize, 57th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (2017); The Necessary Reconditioning of the Highly Deserving, Commonwealth & Council, Los Angeles (2017); and Tenses: Artists in Residence 2015-16, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2016).

Hill is the recipient of a Grants to Artists Award, Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2018); an Art Matters Foundation Award (2017); The William H. Johnson Prize (2016); and a Fellowship for Visual Artists from the California Community Foundation (2015). He was shortlisted for the Future Generation Art Prize from the Victor Pinchuk Foundation (2017), and was an Artist-in-Residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem (2015-16).

Hill received an MFA from University of California, Los Angeles (2013) and a BFA from Columbia College Chicago (2011).