Raised in rural West Michigan, Margherita Hill grew up in a single-parent household with two siblings. Her mother battled cancer for years, and by the time Hill was 12, she and her older sister were caring for their mom full-time.

“I’m not sure how I balanced that and went to school,” she said. “But it’s all we knew. It was our normal.”

When her mother died during Hill’s freshman year of high school, art became an outlet for her grief.

“For me, painting and drawing were the way out,” she said. “It was something that I started doing just for myself.”

During high school, Hill entered an early college program that allowed her to spend two years at a community college. There, she found a more rigorous academic environment, along with art professors who helped her imagine a future for herself as an artist.

It was also during that period that she made a connection to a professor from the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design who helped point her toward U-M.

This weekend, Hill will graduate with a degree in art and design from Stamps, and has accumulated a college experience positively impacted by two study-abroad experiences and a close-knit artistic community.

One especially formative opportunity, she said, was studying in Siena, Italy, where she took medieval and Renaissance art history and painting. In six weeks, she completed four paintings, while also traveling to cities and historic sites.

“I got a lot of practical painting experience,” Hill said.

She later returned to Rome through Helicon Haus, the undergraduate history of art’s society where she served as social chair. Through that work, she helped plan exhibitions and events, ran social media, and submitted artwork to student shows.

Hill also worked as an undergraduate research assistant for Irina Aristarkhova, a professor of art and design at the Stamps School, on an archive connected to subRosa, a cyberfeminist art collective. And she worked as a peer information consultant in the library.

The art she’s produced over her time at U-M has remained closely tied to the afterlife of grief. Hill’s paintings in the Path Forward BA senior show focused on her relationship with her sister and the way loss reshaped it over time.

“Not just about the loss of our mom, but about the way that we grieve together and the way that it altered our relationship,” Hill said.

More recently, she has been developing a senior project centered on social welfare and food assistance programs, inspired by the support that helped sustain her own family while growing up.

Outside the studio, Hill enjoyed some of Ann Arbor’s quieter pleasures. She and her friends liked seeing indie films at the State Theatre and Michigan Theater, browsing used books at Dawn Treader, and spending time in Kerrytown at the farmers market and coffee shops.

After graduation, Hill plans to move to Chicago with a fellow Stamps student, where she will spend the next few years working in art education or advocacy before pursuing a master’s degree in art administration or art history.

What she expects to miss most about U-M, she said, is access to studio space, along with the creative community.

“I’ve definitely become a better artist because I’m surrounded by all these really talented people,” she said.