About Charlie I. Miller
The Short Version
Charlie I. Miller is a stage director, filmmaker, and video artist working in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Denver, Colorado. He is currently finishing his senior year at Harvard College, majoring in Visual and Environmental Studies (VES), with an emphasis on filmmaking, video, and performance.
The Long Version
Charlie began performing at age four when he appeared as the youngest goat in a production of The Three Billy Goats Gruff, and has loved the performing arts ever since. After acting, directing, and videoing his way through middle and high school, Charlie entered Harvard, where he has pursued his artistic passions with greater intensity.
Within the first month of his freshman year, Charlie produced and directed 2004: An Election Year Odyssey, an original one-act musical that he co-wrote to inspire college students to vote. Charlie was then selected as one of the first freshmen ever to direct a production of the Harvard-Radcliffe Gilbert and Sullivan Players (HRG&SP) , one of the premier theatre organizations on campus. After successfully staging Princess Ida, Charlie was invited to join the HRG&SP Board of Directors, on which he has served ever since. As Treasurer and then President, Charlie led HRG&SP through its historic fiftieth year, directing the 50th Anniversary productions of H.M.S. Pinafore and Trial By Jury. Both Pinafore and Trial were honored by the Harvard Crimson as its "Favorite Harvard Performance."
Outside of HRG&SP, Charlie has been involved in over a dozen Harvard productions in a variety of capacities from producing to writing to designing, and even performing, starring as Dr. Frank-N-Furter in the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club's production of the Rocky Horror Show.
In addition to his extracurricular work in theatre, Charlie has explored his cinematic passions in the classroom and studio. VES has provided Charlie with an extraordinary practical and theoretical foundation for his film and video work, and he has created over two dozen film, video, animation, and performance projects while at Harvard. His most recent 16mm film, Patina, explores the challenges an artist and his family face as he develops Alzheimer's disease.
Charlie has also been involved in professional theatre in Denver for the past five years. He was commissioned as lead playwright for two original socially-minded musicals for Show Up Productions, and served as that company's College Outreach Coordinator. Since the summer of 2006, when Charlie became the first alumnus of the Wolf Theatre Academy to return and direct one of the Academy's mainstage productions, he has taught acting and directed at the Mizel Arts & Culture Center.
For the past four years, Charlie has stage managed for PHAMALY (the Physically Handicapped Actors and Musical Artists League), a Denver-based professional theatre company comprised entirely of performers with disabilities. PHAMALY performs at the Denver Performing Arts Complex, an equity house, where Charlie has regularly supervised a cast of thirty actors and crew of over forty stagehands and technicians.
Charlie is excited to combine his many artistic interests in his most recent project, username: FAUST, which is also his senior honors thesis for VES. Like his previous work with PHAMALY, this innovative multimedia production features a cast of performers with a variety of disabilities. By forging new connections between digital media and live performance, username: FAUST explores how a temporal event can exist beyond the theatrical moment.
Charlie plans to continue his work in multimedia and performace to create future projects that intersect the arts with digital culture and that are accessible to all.
