We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Megan Ford-Miller a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Megan, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s the kindest thing anyone has ever done for you?

Before moving to California to support my son in his pursuit of acting, I ran a therapeutic art program. It was really hard to give up this business I had built. Especially because it was the first time I was fully making a living using art. I had contracts with both a school for kids with disabilities and the counties foster home for minor children. I also worked one on one with clients in their home. After several years of traveling back forth between TX and Los Angeles I chose to stay in LA.

Megan, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Megan Ford-Miller is a multi-discipline artist working in mediums ranging from mixed media art to writing, directing, producing, and designing both live theatre and film. Megan’s love for the arts began at a very young age, she started attending performing arts school in the 3rd grade. Since her journey started she has been in dozens of theater productions, ballets, musicals, print modeling and television in her formative years. As a young adult she focused on mixed media and photography and also occasionally still working in local theater sometimes on stage but mostly in production design. Megan married her husband Shawn in 1999 and was mainly working in marketing, using her talents in art and design in that creative space. While living in TX having moved from her southern roots of GA and TN, she decided it would be best to homeschool her children Reid and Bailey. At the time they were around ages 9 and 12 . After the first year of homeschooling she knew this had been a great decision for their family, but she needed an outlet. During that time Megan has become very interested in nutrition and exercise and how it affects the brain and mental health issues. Anxiety runs deep in her family and was a big part of the decision to homeschool her children. She found a non-profit called Art Without Boundaries, they use a therapeutic art exercise to help balance brain chemicals and create an environment in the brain for potential healing called neuroplasticity. This was an opportunity to blend her love for art with helping people and also make her her own schedule as a mom. After about a year of training and a practicum with the woman who created the therapy, she started her business Bright Minds Art. Megan made quick used of her sales and marketing background and quickly landed a contract with a Pre-K through 12th grade private school for children with disabilities in Midland, TX. She also received a contract a year or so later to work with the West TX foster care program based on the amazing work she was doing at the school. Megan continued working as a Mneme Therapist for many years until 2015, she had scales back her work starting in 2013.
In 2013 her son, Reid Miller decided he wanted to get serious about his acting career. So she began focusing her energy on helping him. By supporting Reid, she circled back to the entertainment industry in which she started. They eventually moved to Los Angeles after many, many, trips back and forth between TX and Los Angeles. By 2015 Reid was working so much they were spending more time in Los Angeles than in TX, the last year of back and forth they made that almost 20 hour drive over 12 times in one year.
It took several years for their family to fully make the move, but Megan and her husband and son currently reside in Pasadena. Her daughter is married and lives in Illinois.
Megan is very involved in theater and typically involved in several productions every year. She also continues her work within the Autism community as a therapist for a private healthcare company.
What Megan sees as her creative outlets, many people see as work, but she has always had an inate desire to not only create but learn new things. Her current art focus is mixed-media using vintage glassware and photos with dried flowers and resin. Megan’s favorite outing is thrifting and looking for vintage and antique treasures. You can find her work in her Etsy shop, artfuleccentric.etsy.com
Her most recent theater project was in June 2023 as part of the Hollywood Fringe Festival. She directed a 5 show run of a play she wrote called KARMA in a FISHBOWL, a comedy about four parents that takes place in the waiting room of a kids acting studio.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

I think the biggest disconnect for myself and non creatives is not understanding my commitment to so many things. They don’t get why I just don’t do art? Or why not just work in theater or film? I think to those people it feels like I am undisciplined or unfocused. And honestly my long undiagnosed ADD is probably a factor. But I enjoy all of it, and I also enjoy the process of learning through discovery, and yes sometimes error. But my spontanaety that some people would view as a negative trait can birth some really great ideas and the power to not hesitate has given me some of my best work creativly.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

The biggest way society can support art is to stop devaluing it. By paying artist appropriately for there work. And also by nurturing it and including it in education. By removing art from educational programs not only do we deny creative children an outlet, but we are teaching them art isn’t an important of education. More and more studies prove art is a valuable part of stimulating and balancing the brain. With the overwhelming number of neurodivergent children we should be encouraging art in school on a daily basis.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://artfuleccentric.etsy.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/artfuleccentric
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/megan-ford-miller-73257349

Image Credits
Myself