Hillary Pierce

Hillary Pierce is an Emmy-award winning documentary filmmaker who floats between the city life of Austin and the desert of Far West Texas. She spent several years working in scripted film and television in her native North Carolina before relocating to New York City to begin a career in documentary film under the tutelage of Direct Cinema pioneer Albert Maysles.
She has spent the better part of the last decade producing feature documentaries including Keith Maitland's 2016 films TOWER and A SONG FOR YOU: THE AUSTIN CITY LIMITS STORY, Ben Masters' 2019 THE RIVER AND THE WALL, and Maisie Crow’s AT THE READY.
TOWER is a largely animated re-telling of the first mass American school shooting at the University of Texas in 1966. This action-packed documentary shares the untold story of that day - when the worst in one man brought out the best in so many others. It won the Grand Jury Documentary Prize and Audience Award at SXSW in 2016, broadcast nationally on PBS’ Independent Lens, was shortlisted for an Academy Award, nominated for a Peabody, and won the 2018 EMMY® for Outstanding Historical Documentary.
Hillary followed the success of TOWER with THE RIVER AND THE WALL , a politics-meets-adventure film that followed five friends as they travel the entire length of the Texas-Mexico border to see firsthand the effects Trump's border wall would have on the people and environment. THE RIVER AND THE WALL premiered at SXSW in 2019 and won the Louis Black "Lone Star" Award. It was released theatrically and digitally in May of 2019 and broadcast on Starz the following October. THE RIVER AND THE WALL was nominated for the 2020 EMMY® for Outstanding Nature Documentary.
She produced EMMY® award-winning director Maisie Crow's intimate coming of age teen law enforcement doc AT THE READY which premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival and can be seen streaming on Max.
Most recently she worked with acclaimed fashion photographer turned documentary director Ethan James Green for the short film THIS GIRL’S LIFE: ON GROWING UP TRANS IN TEXAS which is streaming on Vogue.com.
Hillary is currently developing several documentaries as well as consulting for fellow filmmakers. She is a member of the International Documentary Association and the Documentary Producers Alliance.