On her first day as executive director of the Milford Arts Council, Paige Miglio walked into a building that hadn't changed since it opened in 1995. The carpet was original. The paint was original. So was the palette — teal and peach — and the curtains, hand-sewn with pull-backs by volunteers three decades earlier. The roof leaked. And the basement flooded.
“Walking in the first time, I knew the place was magic,” she says to me one afternoon at the Milford City Lifestyle studio. Her shoes are off and she sits casually perched, knees up, in the leather chair across from me. “My mind just started racing.”
Thirteen years later, the MAC has new carpet, a repaired facade, a state-of-the-art HVAC system, two event kiosks, a downtown map, expanded programming, and a jazz festival spreading across three stages from City Hall to the harbor.
A house full of music
Miglio grew up a self-described "Connecticut shoreline girl," raised in downtown Old Saybrook, close enough to walk to every school she attended. Remembering her childhood, Miglio explains, “We lived in a historic home. My parents had a good eye for design and a great appreciation for antiques, art, and music. And I don’t ever remember not creating art.”
Her parents' record collection was a staple of her childhood: classical, ragtime, folk and jazz music were always on — especially Sunday mornings, when her father woke her with Beethoven on the house speakers before the two of them went down for donuts and the comics. A CEO in New Haven, her father was a founding board member of the Festival of Arts and Ideas in New Haven and spent years raising money to rebuild the organ at the family's church. “He understood the vitality of a community that has arts and culture embedded in it,” she recalls. Her mother was a self-taught painter and a kindergarten teacher who kept ragtime and folk music playing through nap time.
“My parents loved to host parties,” she remembers. “My mother would put all this time into preparation for a party, and then she’d spend the entire night in the kitchen washing dishes.” Paige herself became the de facto hostess, remembering that, unlike many kids her age, she was never ushered away from a room full of adults. “I was encouraged to engage in conversation with the adults around me,” she says. “It was a chance to learn. It was a confidence booster. Eventually I tried to raise my own children the same way.”
Neither parent pushed her into the arts, exactly. If anything, her mother encouraged humility when it came to her talents: Miglio learned early not to promote herself or her work — a habit that turned out to suit a job that isn't about her at all. "I'm very happy introducing the artists from the stage,” she says of her work at the MAC, “welcoming people to the space, introducing artists to artists, and helping them gain their own exposure.”
What she wanted, from childhood, was to be a children's book illustrator. She remembers being sick in bed as a girl, coloring in a copy of Winnie the Pooh so hard she tried to erase her work and tore straight through the pages. She still has that book. In high school, she dropped chemistry and Algebra II and talked her way into two shop classes instead, where geometry became architectural drawing and where she discovered she loved thinking in space. Her father wanted her at Yale; she applied early to the Rhode Island School of Design and got in. When her father heard from a colleague that RISD was "the Harvard of art schools," he came around – and sent her a drafting table as a gift.
At RISD, Miglio studied under Chris Van Allsburg, the Caldecott-winning author of Jumanji and The Polar Express, who accepted her as his senior thesis student. He and department chair David Macaulay both reviewed her graduating portfolio and steered her toward a job as an art director at Houghton Mifflin rather than toward illustration itself. It turned out to be the better fit: what she loved wasn't the solitary work of finishing a drawing, but "getting into other artists' heads" — matching illustrators to projects, solving problems through other people's work. She spent several years after that as studio manager of Studio Goodwin Sturges, a Boston children's book studio she helped build from a handful of illustrators to more than thirty by the time she left.
The dead ends that added up
Miglio moved to Milford with her family when her son was two, and it was there, as a PTA mom at Simon Lake Elementary, that her real education for the MAC began — though nobody, least of all her, would have called it that at the time. When the school's art teacher fell ill, Miglio stepped in as a long-term substitute with no teaching background at all, drawing on what she'd learned in publishing to teach color theory with nothing but cerulean, fuchsia, yellow and black paint. She had first-graders finger-paint colors that fifth-graders later turned into Eric Carle–style collages, and her youngest students painted stained-glass murals inspired by Kandinsky. “It truly was transgenerational collaboration at work,” she says. “Older kids using materials that younger kids made – it solidified art as a community builder.”
She followed that by dreaming up "Fantasy Islands of Reading," a literacy initiative that turned the school into three themed reading rooms — a starlit campfire scene in the gym, a cloud-covered sky in the art room, a woodland mural in the library — staffed by nine community readers and promoted with a six-foot inflatable gorilla named Herman that students bid on to take home for the weekend. Ninety percent of the school showed up. That initiative won state acknowledgement.
Event planning, audience-building, problem-solving through arts and culture – all rich experiences that at the time seemed to always meander around something else that was happening. “They were temporary experiences, they never stood alone,” Miglio recalls. “But all of these ‘dead ends’ were a path to what I do now.”
Finding the MAC
Miglio found the Milford Arts Council a few years later, encouraged by a friend, fellow artist and Milford institution Cathy Liontas who told her flatly: "Paige, you've got to get involved in something." She started as a volunteer, coordinating a downtown mural project in which she herself took part in painting. One afternoon, she was painting a mural alongside then-executive-director Bill Meddick when he mentioned he was considering retirement. Miglio told him that if he was serious, she'd be serious about stepping into the role.
The board wasn't convinced. "We don't want another artist," she remembers being told. "I'm not that type of artist," she told them. "I'm an artist who has worked for the man, who works under deadlines, who problem solves, who has managed teams." She built a resume out of her scattered, unconventional career — a friend who was a college provost helped her shape it — and still calls that document, only half-joking, "my life story."
The MAC hired someone else first before the job came back to her. She started within a week of getting the call, and found an organization that was hungry for vision and innovation.
Building the house she inherited
What followed was years of unglamorous, essential work: a state-funded lighting upgrade, a renegotiated HVAC contract structured so staff got a wage adjustment once it was paid down, and a competitive state "Good to Great" grant — the first time the program had opened to small and mid-sized arts organizations — that funded new carpet, paint, signage, and two playbill kiosks Miglio designed herself. She worked with the town cartographer on a downtown walking map that finally showcased Milford's expansive green that, to the surprise of most residents, is also an arboretum. She also pressed Metro-North, whose platform backs up to the MAC (a Civil War-era eastbound train station), into repairing a worn façade and flooding issues.
The work was completed in 2016, and Miglio turned to programming: expanding the caliber and range of music the MAC booked, and launching a series called Nitespot Nights with Pantochino Productions that brought Broadway and cabaret performers down from New York — and their New York audiences with them, riding the train to experience "little old New England" Milford and its restaurants. After multiple community conversations, she reworked the Firehouse Gallery into a low-cost, commission-free space for artists to curate their own shows, encouraged a group of volunteers and Board members to start a monthly open mic, and welcomed the idea of a comedy series called Laugh Tracks. During the pandemic, she shifted East/West PlayFest, a one-act play competition that at its peak drew 500 submissions nationally, and moved it outdoors during the pandemic to the Historical Society, where it has stayed. The MAC's theater group, Eastbound, began staging Shakespeare in Eisenhower Park. And the jazz series grew steadily enough that Miglio started to imagine Milford could support something bigger.
The culmination: Jazz'n Downtown
That dream became Jazz'n Downtown, which Miglio has spent roughly three years developing with collaborator Stephanie Sands, MAC jazz co-producer, and which she calls, without much hesitation, a culmination of everything that came before it.
The festival is built around three outdoor stages that pull audiences on a walk through downtown Milford, anchored by two spaces that already carry live music in people's minds — the riverside restaurant Stonebridge and Lisman Landing, across the harbor, where the Oyster Festival has drawn crowds for more than fifty years. Along the route, area artists will demonstrate their craft in real time, including plein air painters and glassblowers from Kinship Glassworks. The route is deliberate: it sends the audience past nearly every shop and restaurant downtown.
"It's not only unique, but it is uniquely Milford," Miglio says, "because of how Milford is built — with the green and the business district that hugs the water – it’s perfect for an event like this.” When she pitched the idea to both mayoral candidates and to local business leaders two years ago, she says the excitement was immediate, precisely because nothing about it felt imported. It felt like Milford, presented in a new light.
When asked whether she would consider Jazz’n Downtown a “crowning jewel” of her own career, she shakes her head modestly, a subtle nod to her mother’s distaste for self-promotion. Instead, she explains, “This organization has grown so much. The only thing left to do was something like this. It was really a natural progression.”
What comes next
Miglio has been thinking about succession for a while. Early this year, she told the MAC's board she believed fifteen years was the right tenure for an executive director — meaning she had roughly two years left to help the organization define its next chapter and find the right person to lead it. Then, this spring, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She has since completed treatment and is now several months into a five-year course of medication, with what she describes as tremendous support from the MAC's staff and board throughout.
The diagnosis sharpened the timeline, but it also sharpened her sense of what mattered. "I think it really positions me to reassess myself as an artist," she says. "What have I learned from all the artists and creative people I've met? It's always about the big picture, but what gets you there are the individual stories — the one-on-ones you have, and the feeling of sharing something intimate with a few people, knowing it's for the greater good."
She credits much of Jazz'n Downtown's momentum to Nicole Heriot-Mikula, a festival producer Miglio had wanted to hire for years and finally brought on staff about ten months before her diagnosis. When Miglio got the news, Heriot-Mikula stepped in to help carry the festival across the finish line. "There's just a lot of wonderful people involved in this event who I couldn't be more proud of and thankful for," Miglio says. "When they say it takes a village, it really does."
Grateful for Milford, and Milford for her
Ask Miglio what she wants people outside Milford to understand about the town, and she doesn't talk about the MAC at first. She talks about how many working artists and musicians live here, most with no connection to her organization, simply because Milford has quietly been that kind of nurturing place. She talks about a downtown that keeps its New England charm and historic scale — Route 1 was routed around it, not through it — while sitting a block and a half from a train that reaches Manhattan in ninety minutes. She has faith that whatever development pressure comes to Milford next, that essential character will hold, because it's the reason people want to be here at all.
It is, in the end, hard to separate what she wants people to know about Milford from what they should know about her. Thirteen years in, Miglio circles back to the same idea she opened with. Running an arts council was never the plan — there wasn't one, not really, just a long string of dead ends that turned out to be leading somewhere all along.
"I can't look at the big picture without seeing the small pictures," she says. "I can't see the small pictures without embracing the big one. But I think doing this job, for me…this is my art."
Milford has been the gallery. It should be grateful for the artist.
“Walking in the first time, I knew the place was magic…My mind just started racing.”
"It's not only unique, but it is uniquely Milford. Because of how Milford is built — with the green and the business district that hugs the water – it’s perfect for an event like this.”