About Mary
A professional dancer and choreographer since 1968, and renowned and appreciated for her sense of humor and directness in her dance, Ms. Miller enjoys audiences who eagerly await her perspective on the issue at hand. She takes pleasure in involving and engaging the audience, during and in discussions after presentations, and sometimes even as members of the performance, as when the company handed out flashlights for the audience to design the lighting, and when she appeared dancing in revolving doors and elevators among businesspeople going about their day. She has dealt with serious topics, such as grief in "In the Silence, Veiling"; with esoteric subjects, such as in "Clouds, Angels and Constellations"; and with imaginative subjects, as in "Love Duet," in which the man gets pregnant and the woman subsequently leaves him. Ms. Miller’s creativity has brought audiences to Flush, a performance sponsored by the Kohler Co. which sported five toilets on wheels, and has dealt very pointedly with violence, for instance, in a way accessible to all audiences with "Cows With Guns," a part of the five-year Peace 2001: A Journey into the Millennium series.
No stranger to collaboration, Mary Miller has worked with a wide variety of artists, including poets, composers, fiber artists, writers, sculptors, students and schools and a robotics expert. She has collaborated with other dancers, including the year 2000 installation of the Peace 2001 series, Our World: One People, Many Faces, in which she collaborated with UMOJA, an African dance company, and Sriashi Dey, an Odissi dancer, and DanceFusion: Bodaji & Miller, in which she "communicated" with Namita Bodaji, a Bharatha Natyam dancer and percussionist David Bergman.
Ms. Miller is a psychomotor therapist certified at New York Medical College’s Mental Retardation Institute. She has created the Mary Miller Dance Company’s Moving For Life!SM program, a flexible and adaptable series of creative movement classes for students with varying degrees of hearing or vision loss and/or physical or mental disabilities.