To me, dance is life. Movement is life, and the whole importance of dance is to help us celebrate the process that happens to us as creatures of the earth. The connection to the earth through dance is one of the deepest ways for us all to celebrate the planet. By dancing, you can get a perspective of your place in the universe as part of the energy flow."

Jamie Miller was a dancer and teacher who worked in the Bay Area for more than thirty-five years. Throughout her career, Jamie was consistently committed to the creation of community and to the celebration of the diversity of human culture. As a solo artist and as a director, she continually created for a wide variety of audiences.

She was born on May 13, 1942 in New York City and moved to Los Angeles in 1945. She received her early dance training at the Dance Theater of Los Angeles, founded by Lester Horton and the first permanent home for modern dance in the United States, and also studied the work of Martha Graham through Gloria Newman at Sark Studios. Jamie later studied the Hawkins Technique with Ruth Botchan and Creative Body Alignment with Andre Bernard.

In 1965 Jamie began performing and teaching belly dance and creative movement in the Bay Area, first at the New Dance Workshop and later as co-director of Berkeley Moving Arts. Her unique method of teaching incorporated elements of dance, yoga, acting and improvisation, and ideokinesis. In 1973 she founded the Sabah Ensemble, a performing troupe comprised of her advanced belly dance students, and began to produce Middle Eastern music and dance concerts. Jamie and the Ensemble performed in variety of venues, including nightclubs and restaurants, convalescent homes, hospitals, prisons, public schools, fairs, women’s centers, and art museums.

A series of performances, starting in 1976, led to the creation of original solo movement works: “The Erotic Suite,” “The Goddess Suite,” and “The Core Suite.” In 1981 and 1982, Jamie produced a performance of all three suites under the name “Trilogy.” The “White and Gold Dance” (1984) and “Al Sabah” (1985) continued the multicultural exploration which was one of the main expressions of Jamie’s art. Both dances, based on the ancient form of belly dancing, used the traditional music of the Middle East as well as jazz and Latin- and Indian-based music to make a statement about the universality of the human experience.

Affirmation of the feminine principle as it lives in each of us was another important current of Jamie’s work. In 1987 she started to lead Goddess Workshops in which the participants used dance to empower and integrate the feminine energies within themselves.

From 1985 to 1988, Jamie was an artist-in-residence at the San Francisco City and County Jails, where she taught and performed belly dancing, modern dancing, and improvisation to the hundreds of women incarcerated there. In 1994, she received her teaching credential from Holly Names College and worked as a middle school teacher in Oakland.

Jamie passed away from a brain tumor at the age of fifty-seven on August 14, 1999.