Shawnee Miller is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist, tattooer, and muralist from Northern California. She began tattooing full time in 2020 after completing the final years of her apprenticeship at Woodstock Tattoo Studio in upstate New York under the guidance of tattooer and shop owner Felix Vayner. She also worked at East River under the mentorship of artist Duke Riley. She first began her professional journey toward tattooing while working as a screen printer and shop hand in 2017 for her mentor Scott L at Akara Arts in the Bay View neighborhood of Milwaukee, WI. 

Shawnee comes from a working-class blended family of Italian, Mexican, and Native American heritage. Her maternal grandparents are enrolled members of the Shasta Karuk tribe and community members of the Sierra Mi-Wuk tribe. Her great-grandfather was born in the early 1900s at the mission of Santa Ynez, California in an environment of forced assimilation and indentured servitude 60 years before Native Americans were allowed to become US citizens or own property in California. He first came to Mendocino and Sonoma counties as a teenaged agricultural migrant worker in the 1910s, and four generations of Shawnee’s close family remain there today. In her personal work and in public murals, Shawnee reflects from her perspective growing up as a mixed background Californian to better understand within herself, and help others give voice to, the too-long unspoken effects of  intergenerational diaspora, land displacement, and forced cultural assimilation. She stands as an ally in solidarity with fire-keepers of many kinds, all around the world, and is grateful to those who were able to keep the fire going when others could not so that future generations could find their way back. 

She was a first-generation college student, and achieved a BS in Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology from the University of California.  Before becoming a full time tattooer, she worked as a traveling wildlife biologist in rural California and Alaska conversation efforts for birds and salmon. She worked doing outreach and a wildlife education for native and settler schoolchildren at the Alaska Songbird Institute , as a farmhand for organic produce farms on both the east and west coasts, and worked in the service industry as a server and bartender in many cities along the way. Her work ranges in media from illustrations, paintings, cut paper, comic strips, and is often assembled from salvaged materials she finds on her travels. She is inspired by folk art, textile designs, native plants and birds, 1920s advertisements, paperback covers of old westerns, and by things she finds on the beach after storms while walking her dog.

She moved back home to the Mendocino Coast from upstate New York in 2023 to be closer to her family, and is opening her books in Spring 2024 to tattoo in Fort Bragg, CA.