Mary Miller

Mary Ellen Miller (born December 30, 1952) is an American art historian and academician specializing in Mesoamerica and the Maya. Academic career A native of New York State, Miller earned her A.B. degree from Princeton University and her Ph.D. from Yale in 1981 with a thesis titled The Murals of Bonampak, Chiapas Mexico. Miller joined the Yale faculty in 1981, and in 1998 was appointed as the Vincent Scully, Jr. Professor of the History of Art. Miller served as the master of Saybrook College from 1999 until the autumn of 2008, when she was both appointed as Sterling Professor and named the replacement of Peter Salovey as Dean of Yale College. She was the first woman to hold Yale College's highest office, and served as dean from December 2008 to June 2014. When Yale University President, Richard C. Levin, announced Miller's appointment as dean, he had nothing but praise for her: "Mary is the embodiment of what you look for in a Yale College dean," Levin said in an interview after the official appointment ceremony held in Luce Hall. "She is a magnificent scholar, a devoted teacher and a terrific master." Miller cited a desire to return to academia as her reason for stepping down from the deanship position in 2014. She has also 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. Until December 2018, she was the senior director for the Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage Art of the Ancient New World at Yale. In January 2019, she became the director of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.