Miller Robinson (it/its/itself/they) is two-spirited and gender non-confirming, avansahiichva in Arahahih— the People's language— Karuk. The term káruk, literally translates to "upriver", the portions of the Klamath River which designates the ancestral territory of what we call the Karuk Tribe now. 

My antidisciplinary upriver/downriver (Karuk/Yurok) alchemical practice is based in Bayside, CA on Wiyot homelands but often includes other regions throughout California—recently Napa and Sonoma Counties, on the traditional homelands of the Wappo, Pomo, Miwok and Ohlone people as well as on Wilkuts, Yurok, Hoopa, Karuk, Tolowa, and Tolowa Nation lands of Humboldt, Del Norte and Siskiyou Counties. Much of my work right now is contextualized within histories of displacement, restoration, and continuance of California (and adjacent) Native waterways and the life ways they support into the future climate crisis.

Broadly my life moves along ruptured currents of body and land, shaped by errant logics of rematriation and the unrelenting pace of capitalism. As my life informs my visual practice there is a direct and very resonant (felt within) tension between ancestral transmission and systemic erasure. The work bends form into signal—transmitting under the surface of mimics, often between gestures, exposing what escapes naming in the colonial binary. Native linguistics and the sensorium intelligence of basket weaving shape a methodology that is neither fixed nor figurative, but contingent, alive, and in motion. Assemblages composed of sculpture, print, and performance ground into the intimate and temporal demands of care and ethnographic refusal. Through layered processes and a fluency in poetics, I draw lines between cellular shifts and cultural ruptures, medicine and harm, survival and syntax. Each material bears weight, holding within it the drag of policy, the thrum of persistence, and the generative slippage between memory and co-regulation. I work not to recall but to re-thread—animacy moving through matter as directive, not metaphor. The practice does not mime the past, but reveals and nests it within interconnected, forward-reaching forms, where trans, Indigenous, and ecological intelligences structure the very terms of life.

Since receiving a BFA from Otis College of Art and Design in 2014 I have exhibited widely in Los Angeles including at Hammer Museum (2023), Craft Contemporary (2022), Southwest Museum of the American Indian (2018), Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (2015), Heritage Square Museum (2015), with Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) (2017/2026), and more recently with my gallerist Tim Hawkinson Gallery (2024), and Angel's Gate Cultural Center in San Pedro (2025). 

My work has been commissioned by the Green Family Foundation in Dallas, Texas, the Hammer Museum and for the current 59th Carnegie International 2026 (to January 2027). I was a fellow in the 2025 Leslie Lohman Fellowship as well as a fellow of the Queer|Art|Mentorship program in 2023 working with artist Jeffrey Gibson. I have received the Los Angeles Capital Group Artadia Award in 2022 and the Harpo Foundation Native American Impact Award 2026 as well at the Fine Prize from the Carnegie Museum Art in 2026.

Thank you to all my ancestors, mentors, teachers, colleagues, and kin for making me possible.