As a teenager, Anna pursued a passion for painting, leading to studies at Olivet College, the Art Institute in Chicago and Cooper Union in New York where she won awards in watercolor and oil still lifes. She continued her studies in America with Rhonda Holmes Nicholls and Arthur W. Dow at Ipswich, Massachusetts. In 1908, she commenced four years of study at the Academie Julian in Paris and with John Noble Barlow in England.

Anna Althea Hills (1882-1930) was an exceptional California impressionist, well trained at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cooper Union in New York, and the Academie Julian in Paris. She was a daring and able painter, and valued member of the Laguna Beach Art Association.

Her early landscapes were done in the darker atmospheric Barbizon tradition, but once in California's light and landscape and after getting to know the incredible array of her Southern California contemporaries such as Edgar Payne and George Brandriff, she embraced brighter joyous colors, increasingly abandoning her brushes for her palette knife.

A tireless art teacher and an advocate for the arts, she helped establish the Laguna Beach Art

Association, the Laguna Museum of Arts, and could often be observed holding painting classes along Laguna Beach cliffs. She also administered art education for the Orange County schools by organizing traveling exhibitions of students' work

After her studies in Chicago and New York, she moved to Paris in 1908 and remained in Europe four years. During her stay, she attended the Julian Academy and painted landscapes throughout France, Holland, and the South of England.

In 1912, she moved to Southern California, and a year later, settled in Laguna Beach. According to Ruth Westphal (author of Plein Air Painters of California), Anna Hills became "a prominent figure in the art history of Southern California." Her favored locales were in and around Laguna Beach, Mission San Juan Capistrano, the California Coast as far north as Carmel, and she often spent the winter months in nearby Banning and Hemet from where she enjoyed painting excursions into the California and Arizona deserts.

In addition to her intensive artistic output, she found time to teach and the drive to serve as a founding member of the Laguna Art Association, serving as its President for six terms. In the year before her death, she masterminded the campaign to establish what is now the Laguna Museum of Art.

Throughout her teaching and Art Association activities, Anna sought to expand the public's awareness of art and the beauty of the Southern California landscape.

Tragically for the California Art World (according to the Fleischer Museum website), Anna Hills died of a heart attack at the age of 48. One can't help but wonder what her painting career could have produced if she had several more decades of life.

Anna exhibited widely, including exhibiting with the San Francisco Art Association, the California Art Club, the Panama Pacific Exhibition in San Diego, the Laguna Beach Art Association, the California State Fair in Sacramento. She had one-person shows at the Kanst Galleries in Los Angeles. the Los Angeles Museum, and California State University, Long Beach. Her works are often featured in shows offered by the Irvine Museum.