Steph has been with the ARTIS Lab since February 2022. Her research investigates the scope and variety of emotional-phenomenal experiences with art, with a particular focus on identifying different kinds of experience and the range of impacts they can have.

Steph completed her MSc in Psychology of the Arts, Neuroaesthetics, and Creativity at Goldsmiths University of London, after studying Theatre and Neuroscience as an undergraduate at Middlebury College. She is now a fourth-year PhD candidate with the ARTIS Lab and will be completing her doctoral work this year. 

Her work focuses on the complex emotional-phenomenal experiences museum visitors have with works of art, applying network modelling and latent profile analysis to identify distinct varieties of arts experience. She is working further to link these ‘Experience Types’ to relevant independent (e.g. artwork type, visitor personality, personal values) and dependent factors (e.g. impacts on hedonic and eudaimonic wellbeing, attitude change, and societal transformation). Through this project, she has collected the largest dataset of museum experiences to date, including over 2700 participants and 31 artworks from 11 institutions (including the Albertina Museum, Belvedere Museum, Hamburger Bahnhof, Documenta, and the Venice Biennale). 

Over the last years, Steph has presented her work at 10+ international conferences, including IAEA, APA, VSAC, and ECPP. She is currently the PI of a Microgrant from APA’s Division 10, investigating phenomenal art experiences across medialities, and serves as a mentor in the IAEA’s new mentorship program. With peers from Goldsmiths, Steph is also a Co-Founder of the Creativity Research Network, a group of early-career psychology and neuroscience researchers and practicing creative professionals that aim to cultivate a community of individuals interested in exploring and building bridges between the arts and sciences (check out their monthly journal club!).

While she loves a good museum, Steph’s creative and academic arts background is in theatre and performance. She concentrated on Directing at Middlebury, accruing numerous production credits as an actor, stage manager, director, and producer (with departmental, independent, and professional productions). She also served as the President of the student-managed Hepburn Zoo theatre and wrote independent junior- and senior-theses on female narrative structures and feminist directing practices. She is beginning to link her experience with theatre to her current empirical work and is very much looking forward to further integrating the two in the future!

ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Stephanie-Miller-58

Creativity Research Network: https://www.creativityresearchnetwork.com/