Mary Miller

Mary Ellen Miller (born December 30, 1952) is an American art historian and Dean of Yale College. In 1998, she was appointed as the Vincent Scully, Jr. Professor of the History of Art. In 2008, she was appointed as Sterling Professor at Yale. She has served as the Chair of the History of Art, Latin American Studies, and Archaeological Studies Departments at Yale, as well as Director of Undergraduate Studies of the History of Art.

She served as the guest curator for "The Courtly Art of the Ancient Maya", a highly acclaimed exhibition of Maya art that took place in 2004 at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. For that exhibition, she wrote the catalogue of the same title—a finalist for the Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award of the College Art Association—with Simon Martin, senior epigrapher at the University Museum, University of Pennsylvania. A previous exhibition catalogue, The Blood of Kings, co-authored with Linda Schele was awarded the Barr Prize in 1986.

She has worked for many years on her archaeological project to document and reconstruct the Maya wall paintings at Bonampak, Mexico. Miller is the author of Maya Art and Architecture, The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and The Maya: A Dictionary of Mesoamerican Religion (with Karl Taube), The Art of Mesoamerica, The Murals of Bonampak, and, with Linda Schele, The Blood of Kings. Her many articles address questions of Aztec and Maya art, as well as the historiography of Precolumbian art. She has won national recognition for her work on the Maya, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, and she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. A native of New York State, Miller earned her A.B. degree from Princeton University and her Ph.D. from Yale.

Miller served as the Master of Saybrook College, Yale University from 1999 until the autumn of 2008, when she was named the replacement of Peter Salovey as the Dean of Yale College.