Lloyd H. Miller

Lloyd Miller is a teaching artist, musician, and writer based in Brooklyn, NY. He’s the founder, frontman, and chief songwriter of the Deedle Deedle Dees, a band that combines music with theater, dance, video, and other mediums in performances, workshops, and school residencies in New York City and all around the country. He’s also known for regular community sing-a-longs and his musical outreach work with hospitals, care facilities, and community organizations.

The Deedle Deedle Dees specialize in songs inspired by history, science, folklore, and literature and put special emphasis on overlooked and unsung people and events. Their 2016 album, The Rocket Went Up! tells true stories of science, discovery, and magic. Their 2011 album, Strange Dees, Indeed, was featured on NPR's All Things Considered and was in heavy rotation on Sirius XM and family radio programs across the country. The album was named one of the top 10 albums of 2011 by the Fids & Kamily critics poll and has made many other best-of lists. The band is currently completing a record they’re planning to release sometime in 2018 that offers a very personal and impassioned take on recent events in songs like the reflective “Voting with My Mom,” the raucous call to action, “My Brain is a Fist,” and the punky tongue-in-cheek response to growing anti-intellectualism, “If You Don’t Like Science (That’s Fine).”

Working in public and private schools in New York City and beyond, Lloyd has been creating original musical productions with kids for the past fourteen years. With second graders in Brooklyn he has written and performed shows featuring all-original music based on The Aeneid,The Epic of Gilgamesh,The Myth of Osiris, Twelfth Night, and several others. In 2003, he created a rock musical of A Midsummer Night's Dream along with director Maria Osborn and all-middle school band at Saint Ann's School in Brooklyn Heights. In 2009, he created a song cycle based on the history of New Jersey with a fourth-grade class and then performed with the full Deedle Deedle Dees band at the Alexander Kasser Theater at Montclair State University. In 2010, he composed and directed Who Stole the Sousaphone? This whodunnit musical was written from scratch over three months with five 2nd-grade classes in Port Washington, Long Island. In 2011, he put out a mini-album of songs resulting from the musical version of Hamlet he wrote with elementary school students.

Lloyd performs jazz, klezmer, bluegrass, and R&B with a variety of ensembles, including The Swayze Lift, a string-and-horns outfit that plays early jazz and 80s covers. He also has a number of theater and film projects in the works, most notably Trashed Out, a multi-media jazz musical about the housing crisis in Florida he wrote with Roy Nathanson, and The North Star, a short-form musical mystery video series for kids.

Lloyd has worked as an NYC public high school teacher, an instructor of the GED and ESL, and as a tutor and these experiences have had a major influence on his music, film, and theater projects.