Cara Miller

Student

“I got nothing from education when I was younger. But coming back to SMC has so much more weight and value. It’s just magnificent.”

“When I was growing up I hated school. But as I became an adult with some life experience under my belt, my thinking changed,” says Cara Miller, full-time hairdresser and future art historian. “My appreciation and thirst for knowledge have grown over the years, and I’ve come to realize that education is absolutely the most important thing you can have. And I’d like the younger students to realize they’ve got a treasure here that they should soak up every moment of.”

Cara talks about learning with the same passion that she brings to the study of her great love: art. “I’ve been in museums in 12 countries all over the world to study artists,” she says. “And people must think I’m a little strange,” she adds with a laugh. “I put my nose right up to the work because I need to see the paint, the brushstrokes. And sometimes, when no one is looking,” she confesses, “I just have to touch it.” After a transfer to Hunter College in New York, Cara plans to join the ranks—up in front of the classroom—with some of the people she most admires at SMC.

“I’ve had phenomenal teachers here like D’nese Granger and Mario Semere,” she says. “But this whole new path opened up for me when I took an anthropology class with Shirley Saint-Leon,” she says. “We studied how succeeding generations of humanity express themselves, and I realized that’s the story of us all. It’s the lives of the artists that I want to study,” she continues. “And teaching in the field would be just perfect for me because I could get others to be as excited as I am about art. And I could still have summers to travel and visit my museums. The world really opens up when you travel.” Especially when you travel to SMC.

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