Dana Miller
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Since December 1, 2009, DANA MILLER is Curator, Permanent Collection, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
As the Whitney’s Associate Curator, Permanent Collection, for the past seven years, Dana Miller has concentrated primarily on the Museum’s collection, working with her colleagues on acquisitions, loans, and conservation projects, as well as curating exhibitions drawn from the collection. During this time, she also organized the major loan exhibition Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe, co-curated with Michael Hays, which was awarded first prize for Architecture and Design exhibitions by the International Association of Art Critics in 2008. Dana Miller also co-edited the prize-winning catalogue that accompanied the exhibition. She is currently in the planning stages of a retrospective of the artist Jay DeFeo for the Whitney, which will build on an earlier show of DeFeo’s work, Beside the Rose: Selected Works by Jay DeFeo, organized by Dana Miller in 2003.
“It has been a pleasure working with the Whitney’s talented staff for more than a decade,” said Dana Miller. “It continues to be a great privilege to participate in the development, research, and care of the permanent collection, which lies at the heart of the institution. I am particularly excited by the prospect of reconsidering narratives of American art at this time in history, and especially as the Whitney moves closer to realizing our goal of making more of our collection accessible to a wider audience.”
Earlier this year Dana Miller co-curated Claes Oldenburg: Early Sculpture, Drawings, and Happenings Films and Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen: The Music Room, along with curators Carter Foster and Chrissie Iles. In 2006 she was one of the co-curators of Full House: Views of the Whitney’s Collection at 75, an exhibition that filled the entire museum. She curated Overhead/Underfoot: The Topographical Perspective in Photography (2005) and was the coordinating curator for Picasso and American Art (2006–2007) as well as the Whitney installations of Cy Twombly: Fifty Years of Works on Paper (2005) and Isamu Noguchi: Master Sculptor (2004–2005). She has also organized traveling collection exhibitions, including Picturing America, which circulated to six museums in Japan (2005–2006) and Extra-Ordinary: The Everyday Object in American Art (2005–2007), which toured the United States for more than a year. She has written about the Whitney’s collection works for numerous publications.
Within the museum, Dana Miller also sits on committees dedicated to loans, issues of replication, the museum’s website, and visitor experience. Miller received her B.A. from Duke University and her M.A. in art history from Columbia University. She is a peer of the General Services Administration’s Art in Architecture Program.
