Born in Cape May, New Jersey, Colleen Dallara Miller is printmaker, mixed media and book artist. She is a life-long New Jersey resident and currently resides in Lawrenceville.
Her printmaking is inspired by her travels around the U.S. and the world, and the colors, textures and patterns of the natural world. Her primary source of inspiration for her book arts is her interest in words and storytelling combined with visual expression.
She is currently exploring intuitive painting in 2D and sculptural works – freeing creativity from the critical mind and going where creativity takes her. Intuitive painting leaves nothing behind and produces works that include messy, beautiful, swathes of color, wild and free imagery and carefully constructed, meaningful/meaningless, pretty, quick and rough, childlike or incredibly sophisticated.
She studied art through high school and college, taking a concentration in black & white photography at Rutgers University. She graduated from Rutgers in 1984 with a B.A. in communications. She also studied media management at the University of Missouri Graduate School of Journalism. Colleen began her interest in art when her mother took her to the Philadelphia Museum of Art as a child, where they both explored galleries filled with Asian art, the Renaissance masters and stars of the modern art world.
Recently, Colleen has studied printmaking and repurposed books with printmaker Kathleen Metaxas at the Arts Council of Princeton (ACP) and mixed media and book arts with New York City artist and blogger Seth Apter.
Colleen comes from a family of artisans and creative spirits, including a brother and sister who are a photographer and watercolor artist, respectively, and a grandfather who did interior design for Wanamaker’s department store in Philadelphia during the 1920s.