Rhonda P. Hill

Rhonda Pnina Hill (born in 1956) is an American fashion industry analyst, curator, founder of EDGE (Emerging Designers Get Exposure for fashion designers), editor-in-chief of EDGExpo.com, a fashion intelligence platform, known for her advocacy of women's rights and minority empowerment, and for promoting ecological and sociological integrity throughout the entire fashion industry supply chain.

Starting in the late 1970s, pursuing a career in a fashion industry with endemic under-representation of African Americans, Hill rose to become the first African-American Vice President of Disney Consumer Products in 1998.

Early life and education Hill was born in 1956 at Craig Air Force Base in Selma, Alabama. Her father was a Lieutenant Colonel in the United States Air Force and graduate of Tuskegee Institute, Tuskegee, Alabama with Master of Science degrees in Science Education from Tennessee State University, and Business Management from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her mother was a school teacher and graduate of Alabama State University, Montgomery, Alabama. They were the first college-educated generation in their families. The Hills chose education and a military life to move away from the oppression they had experienced in the South. Rhonda Hill's first exposure to language occurred while her father was stationed in Tokyo, Japan.

Hill's father retired to Glendale, Arizona, where Hill graduated in 1974 from the all-female private high school, Xavier College Preparatory, in Phoenix, Arizona. In 1978, Hill graduated from the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona with a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration. EDGE has become an international platform advocating ecological responsibility, design integrity, and human rights throughout the entire product life cycle for fashion products.

The art historian and Head of School of Creative and Liberal Arts, Regent's University, London, Gill Stark, in her history of fashion presentation points out that Hill is known for a comprehensive approach, exposing fashion designers working throughout the African diaspora with an emphasis on women's rights, workforce empowerment, preserving traditional methods, responsible development of industry infrastructure by governments, with originality of design and its integration into personal identity. Hill says that cultures need to look at the sustainability and ecological responsibility throughout the entire product lifecycle, including how products are discarded, in addition to upcycling and recycling.

Fashion history Hill is also noted for her historical projects conducted yearly for the United States Black History Month in February that receive wide distribution in the fashion industry. Topics include surveys of African designers, the African diaspora, the Afropolitan, and studies like A Study of Eight: The Untold American Story which covered neglected achievements of Blacks involved in the history of American fashion from early Black ownership of American cotton mills to the role of Black models and designs in the 1973 Battle of Versailles that altered the status of American fashion design worldwide.

Curatorial work Hill is a proponent of fashion exhibits as a means of exposing fashion as an art within a contemporary and cultural context. Hill states that "Like art, fashion embodies the time we live in and society bears witness to the interpretation of its historical and cultural significance."