In addition to a career with the London University School of Slavonic Studies, she was course director of the Joint Services School for Linguists (JSSL), a UK Government training programme to produce linguists and interpreters of Russian, for military and intelligence purposes.

[1] Her father was a businessman: members of the English Hill family had been trading with Russia since the middle of the eighteenth century.

[1][3] Often known as "Lisa", Hill worked in several language teaching jobs before entering University College London, where she gained a First-class degree in Russian in 1924 and a PhD in 1931.

[1] According to her "Who's Who" entry, she was a "Ministry of Information Slavonic Specialist during [the] War of 1939-45"[5] Hill trained military recruits in Russian.

[3] In 1984, Hill married Stojan Veljkovic, described by one source as a "Serbian aristocrat",[1] but the marriage was dissolved in 1995, shortly before she died.