Montana Miller climbs the ladder and grabs on to two rings hanging from the ceiling. She hoists herself up as a soundtrack of violins lingers in the background. A blue spotlight shines on her already blue outfit.

Slowly, she begins to tell a true story from her past as she slips into varying poses.

Using her aerial arts experience, Miller transports the crowd at the New England Center for Circus Arts to a different time.

She is performing her aerial arts piece, “Rescue,” for the Circus Spectacular fundraiser held in March.

When it is over, she will slip back into her day-to-day life as an associate professor at Bowling Green State University in the popular culture department, specializing in folklore.

As a young girl growing up in Harvard, Massachusetts, Miller said she was obsessed with gymnastics from the age of seven until someone mentioned she should do flying trapeze.

After graduating high school, Miller found an opportunity in France to train in aerial arts. She trained in world class facilities and met Olympic-ranked coaches.

Being in the circus was far from her childhood dreams of being a vet, but it excited her that she could make a career flying through the air.

She described the feeling as, “transcending the human and using my body to become a sort of animal.”

While in France, a young Miller wrote to her mother, Kathleen Cushman, about her training. Cushman, a journalist, co-authored a book based on Miller’s letters home. The book, titled “Circus Dreams: The Making of a Circus Artist,” details the life of Miller’s three years there.

“Montana has always been a wonderful letter-writer. Very prolific from an early age,” Cushman said.

Miller went to Harvard for her bachelor’s in folklore and later went to UCLA to get her doctorate in the subject. Throughout her studies at UCLA, Miller continued practicing her aerial skills and performance.

Los Angeles provided various opportunities from corporate events to nightclub gigs while she worked on her doctorate at UCLA.

“I would get hired to perform at raves and I would be hanging over these huge crowds of people,” Miller said. “They would be reaching up to try to spin me.”

As yet another way to push her limits, Miller explored the world of cliff diving. A 1996 Washington Post article identified Miller as one of the first women allowed to dive off the cliffs in Acapulco, Mexico.

Miller said the exciting aspect of these daring performances is “to do really challenging, competitive events.”

Having finished her doctorate in folklore, Miller set out for a job. “Not up until the day I got the job at Bowling Green did I think I would become a professor,” she said.

Calling herself weird, Miller said she was lucky to find a department she fit into.

At BGSU she met her colleague and confidant Jack Santino. Santino, now retired, was a mentor for Miller during the beginning of her career.

Santino said she is unique, inventive and likes to keep her students engaged by integrating stories from her exciting circus and diving background.

One day, as she was settling into the academic world, a friend took Miller skydiving.

And she was instantly hooked.

Miller has spent the past 10 years skydiving and amassed around 3,000 jumps, until recently when the coronavirus forced her to stop.

“I have been running the only all-female competitive formation team in the world for the past five or six years,” Miller said. In 2019, Miller represented the United States in the World Cup of Speed Skydiving in England, setting a record. “All the goals that I had in skydiving, I’ve gone as far as I can with them,” she said.

The next few years could hold another major change for Miller as she figures out how to navigate the skydiving world post-coronavirus.

“This year, another woman at the U.S. Nationals broke that record,” Miller said. “If I did go back to skydiving, one of my goals would be to take that record back from her.”

She has returned to her circus background the past few years, performing a piece about a skydiving accident that almost took her life.

Miller spends her days travelling between Ohio and Long Island where her long-term partner, Mario, lives with their two Bengal cats, Magic and Mystery. She said splitting her time between the two places is grueling, but she wouldn’t have it any other way.

Her friends in Vermont own the New England Center for Circus Arts, where she develops “new creative aerial work” for her own acts.

She said she reached a breakthrough in her career when she started telling stories during her routines and is working on an act that represents teaching during the pandemic.

Between skydiving, teaching, creating, performing and traveling, Miller wants to add a book to her list. In the next few years she wants to use her knowledge of folklore and publish a book about skydivers and their beliefs and attitudes on death.

Miller has spent her life devoted to freeing her soul from the limits of the world, whether it be flying through the air on a trapeze, plummeting to the Earth at over 200 mph or jumping off a cliff.

According to her mother, Miller was “born to fly.”