Hilary Haseltine is a fourth generation Californian, born in San Francisco. Just after birth her early childhood was spent in Bangkok with her parents and sister. Not surprisingly, when she relocated back to California, she found her life very different than her life in Bangkok. At the time, she was not aware that these early life experiences in Thailand would later inspire a need for expression about these cultural differences through her art practices.

In early 70’s Haseltine moved to Vancouver B.C., Canada after attending University in Colorado and worked for various non-profit government agencies within the civil and criminal court system while also attending Emily Carr University of Art and Design, graduating in Fine Art Photography in 1985.  Since she had an interest in historic processes which she acquired during her education thereafter she received contracts from a number of institutions such as museums and archives to consult about historic photographic processes and perform restoration on and reproduction of images from their archival collections. All the while, she also focused on her own artistic photographic endeavours which would start to appear in the mid 80’s and which she has shown throughout Canada for 25 years.

Her art interests include German Surrealist, Max Ernst, Belgian Surrealist, Rene Magritte; photomontage illustrations of Dadaist, John Heartfield; photograms of Laszlo Moholy Nagy, collage installations by the Starn Brothers of New York and the fairytale-like depictions of people and animals from Holly Roberts of New Mexico along with others such as Jean Michel Basquiat, Gorilla Girls, Andy Goldsworthy.