About

Hilary McDaniel (Douglas) is an award winning Poet and was also a founding member and Artistic Director of Project In Motion aerial dance company. She is an Interlochen Arts Academy graduate, and attended Sarah Lawrence College, and graduated from Indiana University. After decades as Artistic Director she returned to school at Queens University Belfast on a post-pandemic international scholarship, to the poetry program where she received an M.A..

As a poet her work has won several awards. The poem Hoosier Sonnet Definition won the 2024 Poetry London Prize, judged by Hannah Sullivan. The poem Why do you want that expensive watch when all the sky’s a clock? took Second Place in the Kent & Sussex Poetry Society’s 2024 Open Competition. Both poems are part of the collection entitled The Hoosier Sonnets for James Dean. The poem The Goat In Tehran was commended in the Magma Editors Prize 2024. Her work has been long and short listed in The Wolf competition and The Cheltenham Poetry Competition, as well as others.

Her poetry has been published in Magma out of London, A Fine Line the magazine of the New Zealand Poetry Society, Abridged based in Derry/Londonderry and Belfast, as well as other papers and magazines throughout the US. As a student her work appeared in the ekphrasis pamphlet What Could Be Carried Poems of the Ulster Museum.

Hilary is a Bill Evans dance method certificate holder. She taught and choreographed for decades, both in a higher education and a community capacity. She is an Indianapolis Arts Council Fellow as well as a former Young Audiences performer. Hilary has written National Endowment of the Arts, New Mexico Arts and private foundation grants for PIM. Affiliated with PIM for decades she has created and directed hundreds of dances and productions for commercial, university and PIM programs, fundraisers and concerts including Midwest Arts, New Mexico State University, Chalk The Block El Paso and Creative Santa Fe’s Fantasé Fest, as well as others. She was guest choreographer with the East Village Dance Project’s winter community performance which took place at La Mama Theater in NYC’s East Village for several years in a row 2013-2018. She has also performed at Lincoln Center’s Summer Festival in association with EVDP.