Rate My Professor Sean Miller

Sean Miller is an Associate Professor in the School of Art + Art History at the University of Florida College of the Arts, specializing in Fine Arts. He joined the UF faculty in the fall of 1999, initially as Visiting Assistant Professor from 1999 to 2005, followed by Lecturer from 2005 to 2008, Senior Lecturer from 2008 to 2010, Assistant Professor from 2010 to 2015, and currently Associate Professor. Miller teaches Sculpture and Extended Media, as well as the Workshop for Art Research and Practice. He earned an MFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1994 and a BFA from Iowa State University in 1991. Prior to his extensive tenure at UF, he co-founded the SOIL artist-run gallery in Seattle, Washington, where he curated exhibitions and initiated projects like the Art Museum Dust Collection.

Miller's multidisciplinary practice explores power structures in contemporary art and politics through obsessive activities, absurd scenarios, humor, and extreme aesthetics, employing media such as sculpture, installation, performance, photography, and web-based works, with a strong emphasis on collaboration, collective action, and relational aesthetics. Key projects include founding and directing the John Erickson Museum of Art (JEMA) in 2003, a location-variable museum featuring collaborations with artists like Yoko Ono, Ben Patterson, Philip Corner, and Gregory Green; the Crude Life Portable Biodiversity Museum in 2016 with Brandon Ballengee and Prosanta Chakrabarty, funded by the National Academies Keck Futures Initiative; Drifting Cabinets: A Portable Collection of Gulf Biodiversity in 2019; the film Exquisite Moving Corpse in 2022 with Chip Lord and Jack Massing; and Fluxus in the Swamp, co-curated with Billie Maciunas. His work has been exhibited internationally at venues including Villa Croce Museo d’Arte Contemporanea and Spazio Unimedia (Genoa, Italy), Deitch Projects Art Parade (New York), National Museum of Ireland (Dublin), Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art (Gainesville), Indianapolis Museum of Art, and Contemporary Museum (Baltimore). Notable publications include 'Inquiry Based Collaborative Learning: The Workshop for Art Research and Practice at the University of Florida' (Future Forward, 2011, with B. Taylor), 'Art Museum Dust Collection: Wearing Away Museum Grounds' (Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture, 2010, with Kelly Cobb), and contributions to SOIL: Seattle’s Artist-Run Gallery 1995–2005 (2005). He received the Creative Catalyst Fund Grant for 'Re-Purposing the Wunderkammer' in 2013.