Her work on prisoner’s rights at Attica aimed to convey the humanity of incarcerated people. She later worked on diversity efforts for SUNY.
When Teresa Miller, a professor at the University at Buffalo School of Law, showed her documentary film about the Attica Correctional Facility during a panel discussion at the Glimmerglass opera festival in 2014, it sparked an idea. Why not, she thought, bring an opera to the prison?
Francesca Zambello, the director of the festival, in Cooperstown, N.Y., had the same notion and joined the effort. Ms. Miller helped persuade prison officials to grant permission, and a year later Glimmerglass took Verdi’s “Macbeth” to Attica. Opera there became an annual tradition, with Ms. Miller each year sitting among a rapt audience of inmates to watch the production.
“It’s culture we don’t see,” Donovan Jackson, an Attica inmate, told the news website syracuse.com in 2017. “Ours is hostility and violence.”
Bringing the outside world behind prison walls — and then showing that outside world what life behind bars is like — was a central part of the criminal justice work done by Ms. Miller, who died at 59 on Aug. 6 at a hospital in Manhattan.
Read more at https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/01/us/teresa-miller-law-professor-and-prison-reformer-is-dead-at-59.html
