Choosing a New Path: Natalie Mills '13, from Art Historian to Social Media Manager
By Becca Gillis
“‘It’s always about noticing,’” Natalie Mills ’13 recalls Commonwealth art history teacher Judith Siporin telling her students. “‘What do you notice? What do you see?’”
Natalie fell in love with noticing at a young age, entranced by trips to art museums with her parents. After taking two impactful art history classes at Commonwealth, her passion for the subject and determination to pursue it further solidified. But the journey wasn’t quite how she pictured it, beginning with her unexpected major in religion, given her Christian iconography–heavy classes. When her advisor suggested she look into divinity school, Natalie struggled to picture herself in that environment, imagining classrooms full of aspiring clergy. Even then,
her philosophy of studying art history guided her thinking: understand context to the fullest extent possible. “I was trying to be like an anthropologist,” she says. “I don’t think you can view something that was a religious icon and used in prayer in a secular setting.”
So Natalie enrolled at Yale Divinity School, which offered a program covering both art history and religion. It wasn’t a fit. While Natalie’s studies continued to fascinate her, the cultural mismatch between her and the school came to overshadow her love of the work, and she began to doubt her plan to pursue a Ph.D. and become a professor. “Every piece of advice I got from professors and advisors was that if you’re not 100 percent sure [about getting a Ph.D.], don’t do it,” she says. “It left me being like, ‘I don’t know that this is what I want.’”
In the wake of that uncertainty, Natalie experienced what she calls a “classic COVID pivot” following her graduation from Yale in 2019. She moved to California, intent on spending a year seeing where lifewould take her, but the places she expected to find work, like museums, soon shut down due to the pandemic. “I had to get really creative and be like, ‘Okay, I guess I’ll just get a job and start somewhere,’” Natalie recalls. She soon accepted a position at a small tech startup, where she enjoyed her ability to do “a little bit of everything” and especially liked her work managing the company’s social media presence. But, once again, Natalie found herself in a culture didn’t quite suit her. “It felt like it was missing the beauty, the visual world, all of those things that I loved so much,” she says.
In the summer of 2022, Natalie happened upon an opportunity to bring the visual world back into her work in a way that resonated with her, when she began her current position as social media manager of Garnet Hill, a clothing, bedding, and home-decor company. Her daily projects range from directing models and photographers at photo shoots to writing up analytic reports to creating slide decks for brand campaigns and everything in between—and she says her years studying art history are surprisingly relevant to all of it. “It’s an art form in its own right to set everything up and style things so beautifully. When you spend hours looking at paintings, you find the beauty in things, or you see why someone did something the way they did, and I think it feels very similar with the images Garnet Hill creates.”
Looking ahead, Natalie sees a position as an art director in her future, building on her current role to focus her efforts on directing and fine-tuning details to capture the perfect picture, enveloped in a world built on noticing.
Becca Gillis is the Communications Coordinator at Commonwealth School. This originally appeared as part of an article in the winter 2025 edition of CM, Commonwealth's alumni/ae magazine.