She is a well-known session and touring musician. Her résumé includes stints with Ani DiFranco, Natalie Merchant, Marty Ehrlich, Dr. Lonnie Smith, the Indigo Girls, Mike Stern, and Brandie Carlile, to name a few. She is also a Jazz Ambassador for the U.S. Department of State and has toured in that role in Africa and Asia. Miller began her musical studies on the piano as a seven-year-old before switching to drums at age ten. Her compositions are all piano-based. She studied with noted swing and big-band drummer Walter Salb in middle and high school and she attended the University of West Virginia, where she enrolled in the alternative music program, studying percussion styles from all over the globe.

Miller's debut album, 5am Stroll, was issued in 2004. She supported it with her band TILT. Given her touring, studio, and teaching obligations, she did not record under her own name for five years. Forming a new band called Allison Miller's Boom Tic Boom with bassist Todd Sickafoose, pianist Myra Melford, and violinist Jenny Scheinman, she released a self-titled effort in 2010. While her work as a university instructor and as a session and touring musician only multiplied, Miller and Boom Tic Boom released their sophomore effort, No Morphine, No Lilies, in the spring of 2013. In 2016 Miller gathered Boom Tic Boom for the ensemble's third album, Otis Was a Polar Bear. Along with band regulars Sickafoose, Melford, and Scheinman, the album also featured cornetist Kirk Knuffke and clarinetist Ben Goldberg. ~ Thom Jurek