Zoë Hyman was not the kind of person you forgot easily. Born three months premature, weighing just 1 pound 7 ounces and measuring 11 inches long, she arrived in this world defying the odds from her very first breath. She left it the same way she lived, having made an impression that was impossible to ignore.
The Charleston, South Carolina native grew up to become a self-taught special effects makeup artist with a love for the strange, the beautiful, and the wonderfully grotesque. Her greatest compliment, she once said, was when someone looked at her work and said, “Oh, gross.” To Zoë, that reaction meant she had done her job right.
She graduated from the School of the Arts and, by 18, had already begun building a portfolio that spoke for itself. She created elaborate masks, including a lizard woman, a cat, and an alien character inspired by the cult classic film Mars Attacks. Her work even appeared in local commercials, an early sign of the professional future she was clearly headed toward…