Gill Wright Miller, Associate Professor, received her B.F.A. degree in Dance Performance from Denison University, her M.A. degree in Movement Studies from Wesleyan University, and her Ph.D. degree in Dance and Women's Studies from New York University. A Certified Reconstructor, she has staged works by Humphrey, Lampert, Limon, Sokolow, and Weidman, and has performed with Carla De Sola, Deborah Hay, Richard Bull Improvisational Theatre, and Lisa Naugle and Dancers.

 

Dr. Miller's research focus is in embodied methodology. She is highly involved in the world of experiential anatomy and somatics, most specifically Body-Mind Centering. In 2010, she created and hosted an international conference called “Somatic Pedagogies” led by keynotes Deane Juhan and Emilie Conrad. In January 2011, she served as lead editor, publishing Exploring Body-Mind Centering: An Anthology of Experience and Method (Berkeley: North Atlantic Press), in which she authored or co-authored 9 of the 30 essays. This fall she is near completion of a film project called BMC and Qi in collaboration with Pat Ethridge (BMC practitioner, NY) and Mark Sewards (cinematographer, NM.) The film is due out in November. Currently, she is working on a second book called Systems and Patterns: The Evolution of a Somatic Approach which will describe the history of Body-Mind Centering both as a response to kinesthetic epistemology and as a cultural event of its time. She frequently publishes short essays on large topics, like ”Creativity and Motherhood “ in the Encyclopedia of Motherhood, Andrea O'Reilly, Ed., and ”Women in Dance” in the Multimedia Encyclopedia of Women in Today's World (both published by Sage Press, 2010.)

 

Dr. Miller accepted the coveted Arnold Professorship at Whitman College in Washington for her excellence in teaching and has received several grants for her fieldwork, including a major grant from the University of Minnesota for her work in “Embodied Research.” Other written research concerns public constructions of the pregnant body, healing from a developmental movement base, and body politics in general. At Denison since 1981, Dr. Miller’s teaching coursework is in somatics, movement analysis, and cultural studies in dance, and in issues in feminism, Women and the Arts, and feminist theory in Women's Studies.