Recent projects include Garden of the Wilis, a collaboration with former film, Broadway, and American Ballet Theatre star, George de la Peña, and classical new music composer-musician, Hyeyung Yoon, unpacking racial and gender privilege in the ballet and butoh bodies, and Our Utopia, a social practice collaboration with dance, gender, engineering, and education researchers and students at University of Massachusetts Amherst around race, gender, and social justice challenges in photography and cycling.

Michael’s current project is time/life/beauty (working title), a dance, music and multimedia collaboration with composer-musician-writer Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky inspired by the life and legacy of famed composer-musician-activist Ryuichi Sakamoto, with the world premiere scheduled for winter 2026.

Michael has also produced, exhibited, and published numerous visual and media projects, including the photo essays MuNK, Nu Tong Gin Khao (with Waewdao Sirisook), and El Espiritu del Barrio Chino (with Paul Outlaw), the dancefilm, Abbey, featuring dancer Angela Betina Carlos, and the multimedia installation, Doctor Chi: An Architecture of Love and Paranoia.

Michael regularly publishes and presents his research in a wide range of anthologies and journals in dance and performance studies, Asian and Asian American studies, media studies, and other fields. His book, An Empty Room: Imagining Butoh and the Social Body in Crisis, narrating a journey through butoh history and practice into contemporary social theory, was released in 2022 from Wesleyan University Press. (Order here!)

Michael holds an MFA in Dance and PhD in Culture and Performance from UCLA, is former Co-Director of Goddard College’s MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts Program and former tenure-track Assistant Professor in Dance at the University of Iowa. 

Michael currently serves as Performing Arts Curator and Asian and Asian American Arts and Cultures Program Director at the University of Massachusetts Fine Arts Center.

His large-scale, multimedia performance pieces include “Rebirth of a Nation,” Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica, commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Seoul Counterpoint, written during his 2014 residency at Seoul Institute of the Arts. His multimedia project Sonic Web premiered at San Francisco’s Internet Archive in 2019. He was the inaugural artist-in-residency at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s The Met Reframed, 2012-2013.

In 2014, he was named National Geographic Emerging Explorer. He produced Pioneers of African American Cinema, a collection of the earliest films made by African American directors, released in 2015. Miller’s artwork has appeared in the Whitney Biennial, The Venice Biennial for Architecture, the Miami/Art Basel fair, and many other museums and galleries.

His books include the award-winning Rhythm Science, published by MIT Press in 2004; Sound Unbound, an anthology about digital music and media; The Book of Ice, a visual and acoustic portrait of the Antarctic, and; The Imaginary App, on how apps changed the world. His writing has been published by The Village Voice, The Source, and Artforum, and he was the first founding Executive Editor of Origin Magazine.