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, where he joined the faculty in the fall of 1999. He holds an MFA from the University of Colorado Boulder (1994) and a BFA from Iowa State University (1991). As a faculty member in the Sculpture Program and the Workshop for Art Research and Practice, Miller teaches courses including Advanced Sculpture, Graduate Sculpture Seminar, Interdisciplinary Studio, Installation and Performance, and Art/Science collaborations such as Repurposing the Wunderkammer and Framing Ecology. Prior to UF, he co-founded SOIL Gallery/Collective in Seattle, Washington, a prominent artist-run space active for fifteen years, and contributed as a writer to the commemorative book SOIL: Seattle’s Artist-Run Gallery 1995 > 2005. In 2003, Miller founded and directs the John Erickson Museum of Art (JEMA), a location-variable museum that has exhibited and collaborated with artists including Yoko Ono, Ben Patterson, Philip Corner, Gregory Green, and Kristin Lucas, functioning through exhibitions, performances, installations, and web projects that challenge conventional art practices.

Miller's artistic practice spans sculpture, installation, performance, photography, painting, and intermedia, exploring power structures in contemporary art and politics through obsessive activities, humor, absurd scenarios, and extreme aesthetics. He emphasizes collaboration and collective action, notably with Fluxus artists in projects like Fluxus 1962–2022: Sixty Years in Flux (Genoa, Italy, 2022), 88: Philip Corner, Jack Massing, and Sean Miller (Genoa, 2022), and the film Exquisite Moving Corpse (2022, with 60 artists, screened internationally). Key art/science initiatives include the Crude Life Portable Biodiversity Museum (2016, funded by National Academies Keck Futures Initiative, investigating Gulf of Mexico biodiversity post-Deepwater Horizon) and Drifting Cabinets: A Portable Collection of Gulf Biodiversity (2019–), exhibited at venues like the Orlando Museum of Art and Cade Museum. His work has been shown internationally at ACC Galerie (Weimar, Germany), Deitch Projects (New York), National Museum of Ireland (Dublin), Villa Croce Museo d’Arte Contemporanea (Genoa, Italy), Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art (Gainesville), and others. Reviews appear in Sculpture Magazine, Art Papers, New York Times, and Seattle Times. Miller received University of Florida Summer Excellence Funding for (H)our Art School: 60 Art Lessons in 60 Minutes by 60 Artists.