Bebe Miller

Bebe Miller has been making dances for over twenty-five years.  In order to further a process of group inquiry, she formed Bebe Miller Company in 1985.  As Miller continues a line of exploration of the visceral, unruly edges of heart and psyche that inform our day-to-day progress, her interest in finding a physical language for the human condition is a connecting thread throughout her work.  In recent years, she has been investigating a mix of text, performance and visual presentation to expand this language, most notably in the Bessie award-winning Landing/Place (2005) and Verge (2001), and Going To The Wall  (1998).  In 1999, she, along with choreographer Ralph Lemon and filmmaker Isaac Julien, completed the award-winning, collaborative film, Three.    

Collaboration being fundamental to her working process, Miller has worked with composers Albert Mathias, Don Byron, Fred Frith, Christian Marclay and Robin Holcomb; visual artists and designers Michael Mazzola, Caroline Beasley-Baker, Robert Kushner and Scott Pask; writers/directors Holly  Anderson, Ain Gordon and Talvin Wilks; and filmmakers Kit Fitzgerald and, Isaac Julien,  among others, as well as the Company dancers, currently including Kathleen Fisher, Angie Hauser, Kathleen Hermesdorf, Kristina Isabelle, Darrell Jones and Cynthia Oliver. She has created original works for a variety of companies, including Boston Ballet, Oregon Ballet Theatre, Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, Philadanco, Phoenix Dance of Great Britain, Groupe Experimental de Danse Contemporaine in Martinique, Sbrit Dance Company in Asmara, Eritrea, and PATH Dance of Johannesburg, RSA.     

Since being appointed Full Professor at The Ohio State University in 2000, where she currently teaches part of the year, Miller has collaborated with OSU's Department of Dance in producing several digital documentation works, including a DVD-ROM of Going To The Wall, a CD-ROM of Prey  (2000) that accompanies its Labanotation score, and DanceCODES, a software template for choreographic documentation. OSU's Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD) was a collaborative partner in the development of award winning Landing/Place (2005) and is continuing this work with Necessary Beauty, the Company's current work-in-progress.  

Miller's work has been performed internationally in Europe, Asia and the African continent, and nationally in venues ranging from New York City's Brooklyn Academy of Music NEXT WAVE Festival to numerous colleges and universities around the country. She has been honored with four "Bessie" (New York Dance and Performance) Awards, a John Simon Guggenheim  Foundation Fellowship, an American Choreographers Award and Artist's Fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council.  She currently serves on the boards of Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project  and Bearnstow, a retreat center in Maine, and is a member of the International Artists Advisory Board of the Wexner Center for the Arts. She holds an MA in Dance from The Ohio State University.