College fourth-year Maya Miller is majoring in Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies and Creative Writing, with minors in Studio Art and Comparative American Studies. As a 2026 Thomas J. Watson Fellow, Miller will travel to multiple countries including New Zealand, Australia, Japan, and Iceland. Miller’s project aims to explore the intersection of agriculture and art, working with farmers and ceramicists to study how clay and soil practices preserve culture and reimagine relationships with the natural world.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How did you come up with the idea for your Watson?

I’ve been working on and off as a farmer since I graduated high school. I took a year off before school to work on a farm in rural Illinois. I’m from Los Angeles, so it was a big move, and I’ve been in the Midwest ever since. I have become really involved in pottery and ceramic arts since starting at Oberlin via the Pottery Co-op, and I always felt that there was a connection between the land and this particular art form that I hadn’t really allowed myself to articulate or explore in an in-depth way. 

This summer, I was working at an artist residency that had a ceramic studio set on a working farm. So I was working as a farmer but also spending a lot of my free time working in clay. And I just started to pull out these threads of the ways that these two practices might be entangled: the way that our relationship, our tangible and embodied relationship with land and with Earth, is reflected in both practices. That’s what got me thinking in a concrete way, and what I ended up writing about in the application.

What are your visions for the project? How do you see it playing out?

I’m starting in New Zealand in August. In most countries that I’m going to, my plan is not to work with one set place or nonprofit, but instead to spend time with various different artists and practitioners — craftspeople, land workers, farmers. Getting in touch with all kinds of different people who are approaching ceramic practice, land practice, and art practice in unique ways has been like one big email puzzle. I’ll be working with studio potters who work with clays that are made in large-scale ways and then imported. I’ll also work with some potters who are digging clay in their backyard and using wood from their land to fire kilns with glazes made from surrounding rock. That sort of traditionally informed land and place-informed work. I’m interested in all of it.

Your Honors thesis examines similar connected themes. Could you talk more about that?

My areas of interest in GSFS are disability and queer studies. I was interested in clay as this material that operates via a kind of entanglement with the person who’s working with it. It articulates its needs in these nonverbal ways. Meaning is made when the clay breaks or decomposes itself; there’s this sort of endless cycle of becoming. It’s an ancient material. It’s sedimented Earth, but you can form it into something, and then that something can become something else. I’ve been thinking about these theories from disability studies and queer studies about entangled agency and decomposition, non-normative epistemologies or ways of knowing, non-normative ways of being — ways of being that are embodied in clay. I guess slowness is another example as well: Clay asks you to slow down. It’s been a practice in thinking about how to write about things that have voices, that are not human voices.

How has your interest in ceramic art evolved over the years?

I joined the Pottery Co-op during orientation week as a first-year. It was something that I was really excited about. I’d never actually taken an official pottery class before. I think there’s a really beautiful exchange of techniques and ideas and questions and challenges that happen there that I love. It’s become a sort of home for me on campus. I do my homework in the shed a lot of the time. The summer after my first year, I spent around seven hours a day in the Pottery Co-op just trying to teach myself how to throw, and, since then, I have done pottery in various other places. There’s an Oberlin alum, who’s also an alum of the Pottery Co-op, who’s a professional potter in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and I’ve spent the last three Winter Terms working for him at the studio. So there’s also this really beautiful alumni network of a lot of people who have really benefited from and remain grateful for the Pottery Co-op, which I know I will for the rest of my life, too.