About

Shawna Miller is an interdisciplinary artist based near Aspen, Colorado.

Primarily a figurative painter, her practice spans painting, curation, and immersive virtual reality, with a focus on the beauty and complexity of the maternal experience. Miller was a 2022 Aspen Art Museum Artist Fellow, and her work has been shown at Helm Contemporary (New York, NY), The Art Base (Basalt, CO), Red Brick Center for the Arts (Aspen, CO), Anderson Ranch (Snowmass, CO), and in Oslo, Norway.

Statement

I’m interested in what the body knows — how it stores emotion in a limb, an organ, or a solar plexus. How it experiences freedom in buoyancy or safety in an embrace. I’m captivated by the body’s innate intelligence and what it might mean, both individually and collectively, to trust in bodily intuition — distinct from intellectual cognition.

I came to my practice through motherhood, when my body became a force of (or for) nature. My longest and most sustained body of work explores the intimacy of the mother-child connection. Creating these paintings opened me to the reality of somatic memory: how our bodies — not just our minds — retain experience and absorb new realities. Pursuing this question leads me down surprising paths. T

hrough representational realism, radiant Rorschach-like symmetries, and my emerging explorations in new media, my projects may take on very different visual forms. Yet each one begins in the same place: a search for what the body remembers and reveals. These works are united by a devotion to somatic knowing — to the body’s inherent wisdom as a guide toward awakening, wonder, and deeper embodiment. What begins as a personal inquiry becomes an offering, an invitation for others to encounter that same wisdom in themselves.

CV

SOLO AND TWO PERSON EXHIBITION

RESONANCE with LUCIA — Helm Contemporary, New York City, May 2025
Arms Full with Maria Teicher — FAO Art Hub, Oslo, Norway, October 2023
Love Letters to My Mother — The Art Base, Basalt, Colorado, November 2022

SELECT GROUP SHOWS

Red Brick Center for the Arts, Aspen, CO — Colorado Juried, June - August 2025
Carbondale Arts Gallery, Carbondale, CO — subject/matr/mother, April - May 2025
Women United Art Movement, virtual exhibition — Artist, Mother, Proud & Serious, January 2025
Visionary Art Collective, virtual exhibition — Belonging, March 2024
Visionary Projects, High Line Nine Galleries, New York, NY — The Collective, January 2024
Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Snowmass, CO — Aspen Art Museum Artist Fellows Show, March 2023
R2 Gallery Carbondale CO — Valley Visual Arts Show, February 2023
Aspen Chapel Gallery, Aspen CO — Les Femmes, April 2023
Basalt Library, Basalt, CO — Capsule, part of the “Taking Up Space” initiative, May 2022
BrooklynWorks, Brooklyn, NY — RPCV NYC Art Show, November 2016

CURATORIAL PROJECTS

subject/matr/mother, Carbondale Arts Gallery, Carbondale, CO, April — May 2025

FELLOWSHIPS & RESIDENCIES

Château d’Orquevaux Artist Residency, Denise Diderot Grant recipient — Champagne-Ardenne, France — July 2023
2022 Aspen Art Museum Artist Fellowship, Aspen, Colorado

EDUCATION

Independent study in VR technologies via Harvestworks, NYC — Spring/Summer 2023
Private study/mentorship with painter Michelle Doll, Hoboken, NJ — 2018-2022
The Rome Artist Workshops, Rome, Italy — July 2018
University of Miami, Miami, FL — M.A., International Political Economy, 2012
Septima Ars, Escuela de Cine y Television, Madrid, Spain — Certificate in Camera > Lighting for Film — 2004
University of the South, Sewanee, TN — B.A., History, 2000

Press

Featured

Aspen Public Radio Interview

Local artist paints ‘emotional and physical manifestations of motherhood’ in new show.

Shawna Miller’s “Love Letters to my Mother”

“When we met in those first heady days of college, poring over our Anthropology and Humanities readings, I learned early on that my new friend Shawna was raised primarily by her grandparents. Of her family’s story, I knew little — and I didn’t ask too many questions.”

Artist's Talk at the Art Base

Shawna Miller in conversation with artist, Teresa Booth Brown.

Ep. 77 Using Interdisciplinary Art Making to Connect with Others + Self

Art is a powerful form of connection not only with others—but a powerful way we can find and know ourselves and how we look at this world. Interdisciplinary artist, Shawna Miller, is in the virtual studio with me today. We chat about art connection mothers and connecting self, creating art to be seen in a really challenging season, wrestling with the artist identity, taking time to experience awe, defining what is sacred, and not getting bogged down in the details in order to stay true to the ‘why’ for the work.