When her final film, The Florestine Collection, was released in 2011, curators and critics praised her work and legacy, describing her, for example, as "one of the most well-regarded experimental animators of her generation".

However, in the years following that tragic notoriety, Hill's life and creative work have been widely celebrated, with her films continuing to circulate to a degree they did not during her lifetime.

After the documentary filmmaker Stan Woodward visited her fifth-grade class, Hill made a stop-motion Super 8 film that she entitled The House of Sweet Magic (1981).

That same year, she and her classmates (assisted by Susan Leonard of the South Carolina Arts Commission and teacher Penelope Rawl) made another Super 8 movie as part of a statewide filmmaking-in-the-classroom initiative.

Quacks, a live action film with a musical track recorded separately on audiocassette tape, is a comic vignette featuring a person in a duck costume interacting with school children at their bus stop.

The couple lived in Halifax's culturally diverse but economically depressed North End (which she paid tribute to in her film Bohemian Town (2004)).

[3] In August 2005, Hill and family were temporarily displaced and lost most of their possessions due to the Hurricane Katrina levee failures, which flooded their Mid-City home, along with some 80% of the city.

Hill persuaded her husband (in part by rallying friends in an ingenious postcard campaign) to move the family back to New Orleans in August 2006.

Hill's films incorporate many other techniques, such as stop motion, three-dimensional puppets, cel cycles, and "direction animation" (drawing and scratching on celluloid).

In 1999 and 2000, she attended Phil Hoffman's Independent Imaging Retreat in Mount Forest, Ontario, Canada, to develop her hand-processing skills.

She gave talks at CalArts, the University of South Carolina, and other venues, promoting do-it-yourself techniques for archiving and restoring motion picture film.

The moving image archivist Kara Van Malssen worked with Hill as part of her 2006 New York University master's thesis, Disaster Planning and Recovery: Post-Katrina Lessons for Mixed Media Collections.

[10] In 2008, the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar posthumously gave Hill its Charles Samu Award, given to an animator whose work conveys "a universal message illuminating our sense of world community".

NYU's Department of Cinema Studies, the University of South Carolina's Film Studies Program, and the Nickelodeon Theatre presented the inaugural Helen Hill Awards to filmmakers Naomi Uman and Jimmy Kinder for their works "affirming Helen Hill's artistic legacy, lived values, and everyday passions".

"[13] Scholar Anne Major published an assessment of the filmmaker's legacy, “Sweet Magic: The Preservation of Helen Hill’s Cinema,” in The Moving Image in 2019.