Heidi Ellis OVERHILL

HEIDI ELLIS OVERHILL Heidi Ellis Overhill died early morning on February 4, 2024, at the age of 68. An incredible creative thinker, Heidi served as a senior designer at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, was a beloved professor at OCAD and Sheridan Colleges, and a designer on projects as diverse as the Loring and Wyle and Henry Moore exhibits at the AGO, the Mesopotamia and Ancient Iran exhibition at the ROM, the former Shania Twain Museum in Timmins, Ontario, as well as The National Museum of the Philippines in Manilla and many others. Heidi was born in Montreal, but spent her childhood in Winnipeg and then in Ottawa, where she first learned technical drawing at her father's engineering firm, working on the Canada France Hawaii Telescope. She had a huge and adventuresome spirit, hitchhiking as a 19-year-old through the United States and riding in box cars, later attending the Royal College of Art in London, working in Milan, and travelling widely, including through India and Nepal with her husband and best friend, Alan. She was a painter and a published author, and managed, with an enormous determination through her sickness, to finish a draft of her PhD in the Faculty of Information at U of T, Conceptualizing the Western Domestic Kitchen as a Site for 'Information." She was devoted to learning, and she never stopped. Heidi could not only create designs, but build them or sew them, too. She loved being in nature and had a magical flower garden she tended to. She loved good food and bad wine, and possessed an amazing dark humour. She owned every Captain Beefheart album on vinyl, and she could stay up late talking animatedly about anything, with anyone. Daughter of the late Doug and Daphne Overhill, she leaves behind her husband of 37 years, Alan Rosenthal; daughter, Nora Rosenthal; stepson, Paul Pintner; sisters-in-law, Arlene Markle and Donna Rosenthal, their husbands, Jack Markle and Sean O'Sullivan; alongside so many family, friends and colleagues who loved and treasured her. Many thanks to all our caregivers who allowed Alan and Nora to keep Heidi with them at home until the end, surrounded by her cats, her books, her paintings, generations worth of objects whose histories only she knew, and by so much love. May her memory be a blessing. In lieu of flowers, please consider a donation to Princess Margaret Hospital, or if you have a child in your life, buy them a book you love and read it to them.