photo by eva wǒ
HILARY BRASHEAR (aka Heart Byrne) is a filmmaker, editor, and colorist. Her work has screened at qFLIX, Philadelphia Independent Film Festival, Vox Populi, the Icebox Project Space, and the Roxy in Philadelphia, and internationally at the Berlin Porn Film Festival, among others. Her short film, Squirrel Hill Falls, supported by grants from the Puffin Foundation and Scribe Video Center, has been featured at PhillyCAM, and won an award in Documentary Independent Producing from the Alliance for Community Media (2022).
Wanting to co-create spaces for celebration and safety around queer sexuality, she co-founded Hot Bits, a queer erotic arts festival, with artist Eva Wǒ in 2017. Hot Bits hosts events in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Boston, and participated in OUTsider Fest in 2019 and 2020. Hot Bits received a Leeway Foundation Art and Change grant in 2019 and will be resuming covid-consious programming in 2023 after a pandemic-pause.
Hilary served as assistant editor on Vivian Kleiman’s feature, No Straight Lines: The Rise of Queer Comics, which premiered at the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival and the received the grand jury prize in documentary film at OutFest 2021. No Straight Lines was selected for the PBS Independent Lens 2023 Season.
Hilary received a B.A. in Sociology from Haverford College, where she studied documentary film with Vicky Funari. She is currently co-editing Funari’s feature documentary about a longstanding community in a YMCA water aerobics class. She balances working on her own projects with freelance editing work for clients such as Little Sun and Kontent Films.
She is drawn to practicing collaborative community media making, and centers projects that explore erotic power and queer & trans liberation.
Hilary was raised in NYC and the Adirondacks by dancers and lived in Philadelphia for many years. She now calls Berkeley, CA home.