Heather Hill grew up in Memphis, Tennessee — the eldest of five — in a family where creativity was a birthright. Her great-grandfather started one of America's earliest music therapy programs in a Pennsylvania state hospital in the 1950s. Her great-grandmother ran a yarn shop. Her mother is an artist.

The senses were always the language.

Heather’s sensory research and design practice, raar raar studio, didn’t begin when she left the corporate world, because she never left it. For over 20 years she has worked in financial insurance, managing multimillion-dollar portfolios, building teams, and speaking at national conferences. The design work grew alongside the day job, until it could no longer be called a side pursuit.

At 45, she enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2022, she completed her Master of Arts in Art Education with a thesis that created an entirely new genre of experiential design education: Hostile Clothing.

In 2023 she was diagnosed with Stage 2b Triple Negative Breast Cancer.

The research did not come from a library. It came from three lived laboratories: raising a daughter with Sensory Processing Disorder and Optic Nerve Hypoplasia; surviving Triple Negative Breast Cancer; and navigating Ménière's disease for over thirty years.

Each experience rewired her relationship with the body, with clothing, and with what it means to feel at home in your own skin.

She is not a researcher who became an advocate. She is a body that learned and then built the frameworks so others wouldn't have to start from scratch.

— MA Art Education — School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2023

— BA — DePaul University, Chicago

— Triple Negative Stage 2B Breast Cancer Survivor

— Ménière's Disease — 30+ years of vestibular navigation

— 20 years VP/RUO — Financial Institution Insurance, Zurich

— Founder, Mary Eugene Creative — bridal & specialty fashion design

— Researcher — SPD parent communities, OT practitioners, disability justice