Miranda Ferriss Jones

Biography

My work celebrates and interrogates the female experience, specifically the power of relationships between women in all their forms–as romantic partners, sisters, mother-daughters, mentors, and friends. In my art, as in my life, I am constantly courting the authentic connection that emerges from unreserved vulnerability and unabashed honesty. I seek to simultaneously expose and challenge the pressures, constraints, and structural oppression that women and people of color must navigate in a racist, patriarchal society.

As a biracial woman, I am interested in duality. I grew up in the mountains of Vermont dreaming of big cities; later, I moved to the big city and pined for the mountains. I excelled within the gates of the Ivy League yet fantasized about running away with the traveling circus. My father, a Black American policeman of Caribbean-Indian descent, and my mother, a WASP with an MBA, were driven by a sense of grit and propriety respectively. Yet both found their greatest joy in spaces of music and art, breaking free from the prescribed identities of their vastly different worlds to come together in a shared love of song and movement. Harmonizing on car trips and dancing together in our living room remain the most vivid and impactful memories of my childhood and instilled in me a deep reverence for play.

Play drives my coaching practice, my parenting, my friendships, my collaborations, and my artistic process. The work I’m drawn to as both a spectator and a creator exudes a sense of infectious play. This is why I gravitate towards musically driven theatrical storytelling. It is in this space that I find these values of play, collaboration, music, movement, and joyful hard work come together most distinctly. It is here that I experience the opening up of a realm of possibility and imagination. A realm spiritual in nature and one otherwise only accessible to me through moving in the wildness of nature or when at my piano, alone in conversation with song.