Community Week Host Spotlight: Missy Miller Brings {THE AND} to Sacile, Italy

{THE AND} card game Good Vibes Edition, Family Edition, Self Edition, Couples Edition, and "12 Questions of Love" by Topaz Adizes. (Image credit: Nacho Rodez)

The Skin Deep's first-ever global Community Week is bringing {THE AND} card game into homes, coffee shops, and backyards around the world, hosted not by the brand, but by the community itself. At every gathering, guests will write their own questions on blank cards, and the best of them will be woven into a brand-new {THE AND} deck, built entirely from the people who showed up to play.

In Sacile, Italy, that host is Missy Miller.

Missy Miller hiking with trekking poles beside a turquoise alpine lake, with jagged mountain peaks in the background. — Missy exploring the Dolomites — proof that her love for adventure and storytelling extends well beyond the lens. (Image Credit: Missy Miller)

Who Is Missy

Missy is a social media marketer, photographer, and storyteller who has spent her career finding the human moment inside the brand moment. She got her start after a Media Communications degree from Colorado State University, landing in professional sports, where she ran social media for the Denver Nuggets, Colorado Avalanche, Colorado Mammoth, and Altitude TV before moving into a global social role at RE/MAX's Denver headquarters.

Eight years and countless campaigns later, her client list stretches from Fortune 500 companies to scrappy startups, all built on the same organic social media instincts. Alongside that career, she runs her own wedding and elopement photography business, work she describes as an extension of the same instinct that drew her to marketing in the first place: preserving the moments people will carry with them.

That thread runs through everything she does. Photography first pulled her in because it let her hold onto something worth remembering. Marketing did the same thing at a bigger scale, once she realized every brand is really just people with a story underneath it. Polish was never the point for her; resonance was.

Missy found The Skin Deep through her friend Karissa, who now works with the brand, and what hooked her was the same authenticity she chases in her own work. She'd rather build something that makes people feel seen than something that performs well, and that's exactly the trade she sees The Skin Deep making, too.

“Stories have the power to make people stop, feel, connect, and remember. Whether I’m building a community around a brand, capturing a once-in-a-lifetime moment, or creating content that brings a story to life, I don’t just create media, I create connection.” -Missy Miller

What Missy's Community Week Gathering Will Look Like

Missy is keeping her Community Celebration gathering simple and personal: a get-together at her own home in Sacile, bringing new friends together around the table with {THE AND} card game. There's no elaborate production planned, just an invitation, a deck of cards, and the intention to let people go deeper than the usual small talk.

What she's really after is the ripple effect that comes after the cards are put away. Missy hopes her guests leave with something sturdier than a nice evening; she wants them to feel like they've found a piece of community they didn't have before, especially for the people in her life who, like her, are living far from wherever they'd call home.

Why Real, In-Person Community Matters

Building a life abroad means community doesn't happen automatically the way it might near family or old friends; it has to be created on purpose, one invitation at a time. Missy sees her Community Celebration gathering as that kind of deliberate act, a way of saying that even far from home, people can still build something that feels like one.

It's a small snapshot of what the Community Celebration is trying to prove everywhere: that connection still happens best in person, one honest question at a time, and that anyone with a living room and a deck of cards can be the one to start it.

What's Next for Missy

Beyond hosting, Missy recently stepped into a new creative lane: publishing a book with her sister, Callie Miller, called Make Way for the Grand Illusionist, pairing Missy's photography with Callie's poetry.

Callie, based in Denver, Colorado, is a poet, copy editor, and founder of independent publishing house Peak & Pine Press. She started writing poetry in college at the University of Denver, where she launched a campus writing club, and the manuscript she wrote for her senior thesis eventually became the foundation for the book she and Missy would publish together years later. Copy editing came first, though; Callie has spent years editing manuscripts for self-published authors and now works in marketing copy editing as well, a background that gave her the publishing know-how to launch her own imprint from scratch.

Callie's creative influences run wider than the page. While she reads plenty of poetry and fiction, she says music, film, and television shape her work just as much, which tracks with a debut book built around pairing verse with photography rather than words alone.

On reading poetry, Callie keeps it simple: "There is no 'wrong way' to read poetry; however you read and interpret it is correct."

She's not slowing down either. Beyond the book with Missy, Callie is developing new titles for Peak & Pine Press and hosts a weekly writing collective in Denver every Monday, partnering with local bookstores to run community events, community-building in its own right, just on the page instead of around a card table.

Make Way for the Grand Illusionist is out now, available online and on Amazon.

Book cover of "Make Way for the Grand Illusionist" resting on a patterned rug, featuring photography by Missy Miller and poetry by Callie Miller. — Callie's poetry and Missy's photography came together in their beautiful collaboration of "Make Way for the Grand Illusionist". (Image Credit: Karissa Basalyga)

How You Can Support Missy and Callie

Follow along with their work:

Want to Host Your Own Gathering?

Community Week is built on people like Missy, ready to open their doors and let {THE AND} do the rest. If her story resonates with you, we'd love for you to gather your own community too.

Join The Skin Deep Community

Karissa Basalyga
The Skin Deep | Global Community Activator