User:Björtstraumur/Simon Hill

Simon Hill EFIAP FRSA FRGS FBIPP HonFSIAD HonFRPS is a British photographer and designer. In May 2020, Hill was nominated President Elect of the Royal Photographic Society (RPS) and was confirmed as President in January 2021. Founded in 1853, the RPS is the Learned Society for photography. It was granted a Royal Charter by HM Queen Elizabeth II in 2004 and HRH Catherine, Princess of Wales as its Patron.

Education
Hill is a graduate of Blackpool and The Fylde College (HND), the Open College of the Arts (BA) and Saint Martin's School of Art at the London Institute (MA). Hill is a visiting lecturer in Creative Practice at Harrogate College and in Photography at several colleges in the north of England. Until November 2016, Hill was a Trustee of the Open College of the Arts prior to the amalgamation of the college with the University for the Creative Arts.

Career
Between 1987 and 1997, Hill spent ten years working with York Archaeological Trust recording the archaeology and architecture of the city of York. During this time, he also contributed to the British Academy Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture, Volume IV, South-East England which involved identifying, recording and publishing, in a consistent format, all known surviving fragments of the earliest English sculpture dating from the 7th to the 11th centuries. In addition to his contribution to academic works, Hill also provided the photographic content for many popular publications on archaeology and heritage. These included the English Heritage Guide to York and to several Ordnance Survey maps and guides including Roman and Anglian York and Viking and Medieval York. He was also the photographer and co-director of the Cultural Route of the Council of Europe project The Viking Routes (1993) and photographer and co-director of the York Archaeological Trust and Oxford University joint project The Roman Empire (1995). In 1996, Hill worked with Ong Soo Hin and Oxford University archaeologist Mensun Bound as the project photographer during the preliminary excavation of the Hoi An Wreck site off the coast of Hội An, Vietnam. The project took four years and cost an estimated US$14 million, recovering over 250,000 intact examples of Vietnamese ceramics.

In 2017 Hill was the winner of the Longford International Art Portrait Photography Award with his photograph of groundsmen, Oliver Clarke and Robert Harris taken at York Cemetery, York, UK. The photograph was one of over thirty photographs taken by Hill for The English in Particular, an environmental portrait project inspired by the Common Ground (United Kingdom) book, England in Particular, an encyclopaedic overview of local distinctiveness compiled by Sue Clifford and Angela King, and published by Hodder & Stoughton in May 2006.

In 2019, Hill was named Professional Photographer of the Year by the British Institute of Professional Photography (BIPP) at the National Photography Awards 2019 held at the Photography Show, NEC, Birmingham.

As an interpretative designer, Hill created the design for Fortress Spike Island, voted Europe's Leading Tourist Attraction at the World Travel Awards 2017

Family
Simon Ian Hill was born in Shirebrook, Derbyshire, and is the son of Ian Patrick Hill and Kiltie Hill (née Johns). He married Carol Demuccio Phillips at Clifton, York, England on 21 October 1987; they separated in 2003 and divorced in 2005. He married Harriet Kendal-Greene (a descendent of John Plunket, 3rd Baron Plunket (1793–1871) of Newtown, County Cork, Ireland) at Bolton Abbey, North Yorkshire, England, on 3 December 2005. Hill has a son (Matthew) and a daughter (Kelsie) from his first marriage and a stepson (Thomas) from his second marriage. Hill and his wife, Harriet, live in Nidderdale (North Yorkshire, UK) and, until 2018, had a home in County Cork, Ireland.