Teresa Miller, Law Professor and Prison Reformer, Is Dead at 59

The New York Times, October 1, 2021: Teresa Miller, Law Professor and Prison Reformer, Is Dead at 59

“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.

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.

As a law professor at Buffalo for 19 years — she was later a top administrator for the State University of New York, of which Buffalo is a part, focusing on diversity issues — she had made it a practice of having her students step outside the classroom and into the penal system as a way to humanize incarcerated people.”

Additional reading:

Watch Encountering Attica (Dir. Teresa Miller, 2009)

Journal of Legal Education, 62:2, 2012: “Encountering Attica: Documentary Filmmaking as Pedagological Tool” by Teresa A. Miller