Nicki Miller

Hello!

I’m Nicki Miller. I am a multi-hyphenate artist based in and around NYC on unceded Munsee Lenape land.

I am a theatre maker, performer, visual artist, and movement educator. 

A half-first generation American Jew-“ish” only child, I was born in southern California on unceded Tongva land and raised in western Massachusetts on unceded Nonotuck land. Raised in a largely assimilated and agnostic environment, participating in various artistic contexts offered early sources of otherwise inaccessible activations of collective joy, community, embodiment, and connection to the larger phenomena of existence.  

I now make art and facilitate experiences that uplift and cultivate these values in our current paradigm.

My work lives at the intersection of science and mysticism, metabolizing personal, cultural, and ecological narratives through multimedia forms. What emerges is “art-medicine” that I offer to help us locate our hearts and the embodiments necessary to move through contemporary crises and dream forward as a collective. 

My creative practice is embodied and interdisciplinary, spanning multiple creative languages from poetry, analog collage, video editing, playwriting, dance, aerial arts, and ritual forms.

My theatrical work is highly visual and takes a poetic “total theatre” approach to performance, investigating the alchemy of all theatrical elements (namely, music, movement, spectacle, artist/audience relations, etc.). It engages these forms as collaborators that work together towards a theatrical experience whose sum far surpasses the capacity of any individual element on its own. It is a form of art making that values the relationships that make and share the work as much as the materials and content that comprise the work. This process is an extension of her fascination in how the interconnectivity within our bodies both reflects and extends the interconnectivity of the earth around us.

Recently, my 2022 performance collaboration Sticks & Stone with Benjamin E. Oyzon (premiere The Performing Garage, Soho NYC) integrated this research through weaving narrative aerial choreography and counterweight rigging, puppets built by both artists, and shadow/light puppetry with original poetic text. The work unpacks the old adage of sticks and stones; asking the question those words don’t address, what happens when our bodies become strangers to our souls?

career at a glance

Since 2010, much of my artistic work has emerged alongside and interfaced with contemporary circus in NYC, Toronto, Montreal, and parts of Europe. I am a three-time grantee of Brooklyn Arts Council as co-founding artistic director of Only Child Aerial Theatre (2014-2021). My aerial choreography work has been featured in theatrical works shown at BAM (RipeTime, Brooklyn Academy of Music), INSITU Dance Festival, and the Circus Now: International Contemporary Circus Arts Festival. I have also performed at venues throughout NYC including NYU Skirball, Dixon Place, House of Yes, The Muse Brooklyn, Theatre for a New City, The Brooklyn Lyceum, and others. 

Internationally, I performed in Toronto with the Contemporary Circus Arts Festival of Toronto (2014) and Femmes du Feu’s Circus Sessions at the Harbourfront Centre (2016) and was a resident artist in Cirkus Cirkör (Sweden, apprentice to Olle Standberg’s premiere of Under). I’ve also enjoyed residencies with the 2016/17 New Victory LabWorks Program (NYC, Only Child), and the Santa Barbara Centre for Aerial Dance Floor to Air Festival. I am a member of the Marché International de Cirque Contemporian (MICC) and have written articles and both facilitated and presented on panel discussions for CircusTalk.com. 

I hold multiple certifications in movement rehab methodologies and have coached aerial silks and rope since 2010. My coaching work integrates lineages from applied neuroscience, somatics, fitness, circus, and post-modern dance. I specialize in helping people cultivate deeper body awareness and conscious connection to their own movement strategies while offering tools for longevity through an integration of somatics, strength training, mobility, and play. Learn more at movementmissinglinks.com. 

I am currently an MFA Theatre candidate at Sarah Lawrence College.

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