Directory

Helen Miller is a British-American artist and writer based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her work explores the relationship of visual representation and embodied experience, for example, the role that gesture plays in everyday communication. She is interested in how human development and interaction, and the class dynamics in which they are embedded, can be seen and felt anew. Intervening in the institutions of family, marriage, school, and city life, Miller leverages painting, performance, photography, and film. She directs postmodern dance in a conventional New England home, for instance, and installs pillows for reading and rest on a concrete college staircase. Miller is currently re-developing photographic negatives of her mother and, in a related project, printing the black lines used in images to disguise aspects of people’s identity.

Miller has been a writer-in-residence at Shakespeare and Company, an artist-in-residence at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), and a Film Study Center Fellow at Harvard University. Her work was included in the 33rd Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil. She practices somatics and is the Editor-in-Chief of The Feldenkrais Journal, an annual publication on mind-body awareness for artists and the general public. Miller’s work has been published by The Drawing Center, The Orion Society, Big Red & Shiny, and The Arts Fuse, and is forthcoming from Taschen Books. Her interdisciplinary piece “Say Tongue” was included in Reading Room by dispersed holdings, and selected as one of the 20 best books of 2020 by the Brooklyn Rail.

Miller received a BA in Art and English from the University of California at Berkeley and MAs in Art from Harvard University, where she served as Departmental Teaching Fellow in Art, Film, and Visual Studies. Miller reads Latin and is proficient in French and Spanish.

At MassArt, Miller has taught in the Studio for Interrelated Media, Studio Foundation, Art Education, Humanities, and the MFA program, where she is currently a visiting lecturer and curator of the Brant Gallery.

In the MassArt Humanities Department, Helen Miller teaches Thinking Making Writing and Writing for Exhibition.