The Festival dedicates today’s final performance of The Passion of Mary Cardwell Dawson in memory of our dear friend and longtime supporter, Teresa A. Miller, J.D., who many lovingly called Teri. Teri passed away August 6, 2021. She served as Senior Vice Chancellor for Strategic Initiatives and Chief Diversity Officer for SUNY and was the driving force behind our performances and programs with Attica Correctional Facility, and we were honored to have her presence in so many ways.
In addition to servicing as Senior Vice Chancellor for Strategic Initiatives and Chief Diversity Officer for the State University System of New York, and was a tenured Professor of Law at the University of Buffalo Law School. In her role at SUNY administration, she led all efforts by the 64 SUNY campuses to address diversity, excellence, equity and inclusion. She conceptualized and led one of SUNY’s most innovative projects, PRODI-G (Promoting Recruitment, Opportunity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Growth) initiative, which was designed to increase diversity amongst faculty ranks and guide campus hiring practices.and was the first such program of its scale in the nation.
Teri wrote widely on legal issues as a professor specializing in immigration law, criminal procedure, and prisoner law. She had a long-standing commitment to social justice that was demonstrated throughout her academic career by her leadership as a member of the American Bar Association Task Force that re-wrote the Standards on the Legal Status of Prisoners (2010), her decades-long involvement in prison reform in New York State, her scholarship on the convergence of immigration law and criminal punishment, and her engagement with the issue of mass incarceration as a documentary filmmaker.
Teri earned her J.D. from Harvard Law School, her LL.M. from the University of Wisconsin at Madison as a William H. Hastie Fellow, and her B.A. degree from Duke University as an Angier B. Duke Scholar.
She was a dear friend of the Festival, and we are grateful for her knowledge and friendship. Today’s performance is for you, Teri.
