Muriel Miguel

Muriel Miguel, born August 15, 1937, in Brooklyn, New York, is a Native American actor, director, choreographer, playwright, and educator of Guna and Rappahannock ancestry. Her mother, Elmira Miguel, was a member of the Rappahannock tribe of Virginia, and her father was a Guna Indian from the islands of Guna Yala, off the coast of Panama. The youngest of three sisters, Miguel grew up in Brooklyn, where she encountered instruction in elementary school that characterized Native American culture as extinct. In response, she and her friend Louis Mofsie established the Little Eagles, a group that brought Native children together to practice traditional songs and dances, meeting in a church basement. That organization remains active in New York City today under the name the Thunderbird American Indian Dancers. Miguel later studied modern dance with Alwin Nickolais, Erick Hawkins, and Jean Erdman, and became an original member of Joseph Chaikin's Open Theater, alongside Sam Shepard, Megan Terry, Peter Feldman, and Chaikin himself.

Miguel's Broadway career includes her 1970 appearance in Operation Sidewinder. In the early 1970s, she began developing work with women of diverse backgrounds, centering storytelling through what she described as sound, movement, moments, and breath. Drawing on personal narratives from collaborators Lois Weaver and Josephine Mofsie Tarrant, as well as her own story about the Sun Dance ceremony, Miguel developed a method she called storyweaving, which unified distinct personal accounts into a single performance. This methodology became a defining feature of her artistic practice.

In 1976, Miguel founded the Spiderwoman Theater with her sisters Gloria Miguel and Lisa Mayo, born Elizabeth Miguel, along with Pam Verge and Lois Weaver. The company became the first Native American women's theater troupe to achieve international recognition and remains the longest continuously running Native American female performance group. Their debut work, Women in Violence, premiered at Washington Square Methodist Church and addressed violence against women. The production was subsequently taken to the Nancy Festival in France, making Spiderwoman Theater the first feminist theater group to participate in that event. Their second production, The Lysistrata Numbah!, debuted in 1977, weaving Aristophanes' Lysistrata together with stories from the group's members. Later productions included Trilogy: Friday Night Jealousy, My Sister Ate Dirt (1978), Cabaret: An Evening of Disgusting Songs and Pukey Images (1979), Oh, What a Life (1980), The Fittin' Room (1980), Sun, Moon and Feather & Split Britches (1981), and I'll Be Right Back (1982), among others. After Weaver departed to form the troupe Split Britches, the three sisters continued as Spiderwoman Theater, with Miguel directing nearly all of the company's productions. She currently serves as its artistic director.

As a solo artist, Miguel created several one-woman shows, including Hot' N' Soft, Trail of the Otter, and Red Mother. Hot' N' Soft, which addresses lesbianism within the Indigenous community and draws on Miguel's own experiences, was included in the anthology Two-Spirit Acts: Queer Indigenous Performances. She also choreographed Throw Away Kids and She Knew She Was She for the Aboriginal Dance Program at the Banff Centre for the Arts. In 2019, she directed Marie Clements' play The Unnatural and Accidental Women as the inaugural presentation of Canada's National Arts Centre's Indigenous Theatre department.

Miguel's teaching career has spanned multiple institutions. She served as an assistant professor of drama at Bard College and spent seven years as an instructor of Indigenous Performance and Program Director for the Aboriginal Dance Program at the Banff Centre for the Arts. She has also worked with inner-city Native youth on HIV-related issues, developing programming for the Minnesota Native American AIDS Task Force, now known as the Indigenous Peoples Task Force. Additionally, she serves as an instructor of Indigenous Performance at the Centre for Indigenous Theatre and as Program Director for its three-week summer intensive, and she facilitates Storyweaving Workshops across the United States, Canada, and Europe.

Among her honors, Miguel and her sisters were founding contributors to the Native American Women Playwrights Archive at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, in 1997, and received honorary Doctorates of Fine Arts from that institution. That same year, she was selected for the Native and Hawaiian Women of Hope poster by Bread and Roses International Union's Bread and Roses Center. In 2003, she was the recipient of the first Lipinsky Residency, designated feminist in residence, at San Diego State University's Women's Studies Department. Miguel and her sisters received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women's Caucus for Art in 2010. She attended the Rauschenberg Residency in 2015 and was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2016. In 2018, she received a Duke Award of $275,000, and in 2019 she was presented with the Distinguished Career Award at the Southeastern Theatre Conference. Miguel is a member of the National Theatre Conference and was featured in the 2022 publication 50 Key Figures in Queer US Theatre, in a chapter authored by theatre scholar Christy Stanlake.