Jennifer Miller (born 1961) is an American
circus
A circus is a company of performers who put on diverse entertainment shows that may include clowns, acrobats, trained animals, trapeze acts, musicians, dancers, hoopers, tightrope walkers, jugglers, magicians, ventriloquists, and unicyclis ...
entertainer, writer, and professor at
Pratt Institute in
Brooklyn, New York
Brooklyn () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York. Kings County is the most populous county in the State of New York, and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, be ...
. She has lived with a beard for most of her life.
She is a
juggler
Juggling is a physical skill, performed by a juggler, involving the manipulation of objects for recreation, entertainment, art or sport. The most recognizable form of juggling is toss juggling. Juggling can be the manipulation of one object ...
and
fire eater
Fire eating is the act of putting a flaming object into the mouth and extinguishing it. A fire eater can be an entertainer, a street performer, part of a sideshow or a circus act but has also been part of spiritual tradition in India.
Physi ...
. Miller lives in New York City.
Biography
Miller is the youngest daughter of two Quaker professors
and grew up in
Connecticut
Connecticut () is the southernmost state in the New England region of the Northeastern United States. It is bordered by Rhode Island to the east, Massachusetts to the north, New York to the west, and Long Island Sound to the south. Its capita ...
and
California
California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...
. Miller became involved in the performing arts and theater while in high school, and was involved in the downtown dance scene in New York in the early 1980s. In her career as a performing artist, which has spanned over 20 years,
she has performed with numerous choreographers and dancers, several circus companies, and in the
Coney Island SideShow. Miller has also collaborated on theatrical works with
Sarah Schulman
Sarah Miriam Schulman (born July 28, 1958) is an American novelist, playwright, nonfiction writer, screenwriter, gay activist, and AIDS historian. She is a Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at College of Staten Island (CSI) and a Fellow a ...
.
In 1989, she established the acclaimed NYC political performance troupe
Circus Amok. She was also a focus of
Tami Gold
Tami Kashia Gold is a documentary filmmaker, visual artist and educator. She is also a professor at Hunter College of the City University of New York in the Department of Film and Media Studies.
Biography
As a teenager, Gold studied in Mexico a ...
's documentary ''Juggling Gender,'' an exploratory piece addressing themes of androgyny, gender classification and identification, feminism, and femaleness through a singular focal character, Jennifer Miller herself. Circus Amok has been the subject of numerous documentary films. Miller is widely recognized for her work and is the recipient of awards including the
Obie,
Bessie, BAX 10, and, most recently, the
Ethyl Eichelberger Award. She currently teaches in New York at
Pratt Institute, and has taught at several universities including
UCLA
The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California ...
,
Cal Arts,
Scripps College,
Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program and
NYU
New York University (NYU) is a private research university in New York City. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded by a group of New Yorkers led by then-Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin.
In 1832, the ...
.
In 2010, Miller served as a co-hostess to
Vaginal Davis
Vaginal Davis (born in Los Angeles, California) is an American performing artist, painter, independent curator, composer, filmmaker and writer. Born intersex and raised in South Central, Los Angeles, Davis gained notoriety in New York during the ...
' performance piece "Speaking from the Diaphragm" at
Performance Space 122
Performance Space New York, formerly known as Performance Space 122 or P.S. 122, is a non-profitable arts organization founded in 1980 in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan in an abandoned public school building.
Origin
The former eleme ...
.
See also
*
Bearded lady
*
Circus Amok
References
External links
*
*
Founder of political theater/circus to perform at MCLAThe Independent Student Publication of Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts 2007
{{DEFAULTSORT:Miller, Jennifer
1961 births
Living people
People from New York City
20th-century American Jews
American Quakers
Bearded women
Jewish feminists
Place of birth missing (living people)
American performance artists
Quaker feminists
21st-century American Jews