[1] While painting a mural at a D.C. society cafe, Miles met a wealthy benefactor who agreed to fund a travel scholarship to Tahiti.
[2] In Paris, Miles studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and with Marcel Gromaire, developing her work in the Fauvist style.
[2] Miles fled the Nazi occupation of France and returned to the United States, where she lived in Greenwich Village, exhibiting with the Betty Parsons Gallery.
[2] Miles began to move away from the Abstract Expressionist style in the 1950s, seeking instead to evoke mysticism and spirituality through pure geometric forms, particularly mandalas.
[2] She combined these simple forms with a distinctive use of gold and platinum leaf that gave the modernist abstractions a medieval or Byzantine sensibility.