J. Michael Miller, founder of The Actors Center and lifelong champion of actors, passed away on March 14, 2025. His life and career had a profound and lasting impact in actor training and the American theatre through the thousands of actors and teachers he supported during his lifetime.

The Actors Center has established a scholarship fund in his honor—the J. Michael Miller Scholarship Fund—to support early career artists in our new Mentorship Program.

In 1966, Michael co-founded New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and helped run its theatre programs for over 30 years. He also co-founded the League of Professional Theatre Training Programs, which advocated for higher standards in the field and whose annual Actor Presentations, or “Leagues,” formed the basis for the showcase system now widely employed at training programs across the country. He was also instrumental in establishing the Fox Fellowships for actors to advance their artistic development.

His idea for The Actors Center grew out of a series of conversations he hosted at his apartment in the late 1970s—envisioning a lifelong artistic home for actors to continue their growth and evolution of craft and a national voice advocating on their behalf. In 1996, this dream became a reality.

Over the next 20 years, Michael supported hundreds of members of our Resident Company, nearly 200 graduates of our Teacher Development Program, more than 75 Fox Foundation fellowship recipients, and nearly 3,000 alumni of our studio classes and conservatory programs. At The Actors Center, he hosted more than 100 of the most respected artistic leaders, teachers, and guest artists from the United States and around the world.

Michael came to see The Actors Center not just as his retirement project, but as a personal commitment to the artists and art form he revered. He saw The Actors Center as an agent for cultural renewal by artists themselves. He would often invoke that if artists could just be supported with opportunities to do their work, the rest of us would grow and prosper.

He fought passionately against the commercialization and creative marginalization of the actor in the American theatre—seeking to rectify the perception of actors as commodities, rather than as valued collaborative artists at the center of our form. Michael believed that an actor’s ability to expose their understanding of our deepest fears and desires made them the most essential of all artists who serve society. He saw acting as a noble pursuit—a profession of dignity and deserving of utmost respect.