Tim Miller

Tim Miller is a Los Angeles-based performance artist, and a key founder of P.S. 122 in New York and Highways Performance Space in Los Angeles. He's one of the 4 performance artists who was denied funding and sued the National Endowment for the Arts (the NEA Four).

"I sometimes feel this border between my body and some friends who are really sick right now. It's like this nice coastline on your arm here. It's a border I want to cross, though. A coastline I want to pull people to. Maybe you have brought a special life preserver and you can teach me how to use it and we can throw it to all our friends who are sick and we can pull them back to shore. I want to hold these bodies really close so that not one more slips away." (Miller, My Queer Body)

"Mourning and celebration are the two poles of this life. I know they are often hovering quite near the surface of the community that gathers to see my work. These charged feelings are quite present in the theatres that I step out into, asking spectators to shout out a favorite place on their bodies. I know I am a queer performer presenting my homo-content work in a time of crisis. My work is also filtered through a complex set of political events around the right wing's attempt to censor lesbian and gay artists. Perhaps this makes these human gatherings for the work more pregnant with feeling and need. The call to community more pointed. I want to feel the full blast of the humanness of the situation. I want, as a performer, to be pulled and challenged" (Miller and David Román, "Preaching to the Converted," Theatre Journal. 47:2, 1995)

"The financial vulnerability of the queer arts is most often the result of an anti-art sentiment endemic in contemporary U.S. culture and, more directly, of the cultural wars fueled by the ongoing crisis of the National Endowment of the Arts; it is not the result of the artistic failure of queer artist" ("Preaching to the Converted")

"Performance artists are tackling the blood and bone of the society...A lot of it is not pretty, but our culture is not about Swan Lake" (Miller, qtd. in People Magazine)