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Steven Hillyer

Director, The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture Archive

Steven Hillyer received a Bachelor of Architecture degree from The Cooper Union in 1990. He has participated in the design, installation and curatorship of twenty-eight exhibitions presented by The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, both at The Cooper Union and abroad. Additionally, he has been involved in the fabrication of fifteen publications produced by the Architecture Archive, in capacities ranging from production coordination and assistance to design supervision and editorial work. Hillyer has been Director of the Architecture Archive since 2002.

Aside from his work at The Cooper Union, Hillyer is a screenwriter, playwright and co-founder of New York City based Arkanjel Productions with collaborator Tim Marback. His work explores universal themes found within the human condition through the intimacies of relationships, and how they manifest our core emotions, and pursues an ongoing search for conditions that are inexorably tied to important societal concerns.

Hillyer’s first feature film, The Event, starring Academy Award winner Olympia Dukakis, Sarah Polley and Parker Posey, premiered at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival. It won the prestigious Siegessäule Jury Award at The Berlin International Film Festival and Best Screenplay and Best Feature awards from the Atlantic Film Festival. The film was released domestically and internationally, and is available on DVD.

Hillyer is currently developing his next feature film, High As the Sky, which he co-wrote and will produce. Inspired by actual events, the project received Fiscal Sponsorship from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2008. Olympia Dukakis is attached to play a major role. Hillyer is also developing a stage play, Mend, which he co-authored. The project received a grant from Great Performances in 2009, and a table reading of the play was held in The Cooper Union’s Rose Auditorium on June 14, 2010. The actors participating included Joanna P. Adler, Kathleen Chalfant, Dominic Chianese and Alfredo Narciso.

In June 2011, Hillyer co-directed the pilot for Cape House, an improvisational comedy show about an alternative realty office that opens in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

  • Founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

  • “My feelings, my desires, my hopes, embrace humanity throughout the world,” Peter Cooper proclaimed in a speech in 1853. He looked forward to a time when, “knowledge shall cover the earth as waters cover the great deep.”

  • From its beginnings, Cooper Union was a unique institution, dedicated to founder Peter Cooper's proposition that education is the key not only to personal prosperity but to civic virtue and harmony.

  • Peter Cooper wanted his graduates to acquire the technical mastery and entrepreneurial skills, enrich their intellects and spark their creativity, and develop a sense of social justice that would translate into action.