Angela Miller-May’s grandparents were civil rights activists who, in 1968, became part of the Great Migration, moving with their five children from a tiny town in Mississippi to Chicago.
Angela Miller-May’s grandmother Beatrice Miller was bent on sending her children and grandchildren to school since she was deprived of education after being compelled to leave school after sixth grade to work as a sharecropper in the fields of the Mississippi Delta.
Beatrice Miller did just that. After arriving in Chicago, her 18-year daughter, Jeannette, gave birth to her first grandchild, who would become known as Angela Miller-May. Jeannette, a single mother, began working for the U.S. Postal Service and asked her mother Beatrice to take care of Angela in her absence.
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“She vowed that I would be the first to graduate from college,” Angela Miller-May told the Institutional Investor recently in an interview. “I was her job,” Angela Miller-May recounted.
To make her family proud, Angela Miller-May took her studies seriously, and after schooling at Chicago Catholic high school, she studied medicine at Northwestern University and volunteered during her sophomore year in the pediatric ward of a Chicago hospital before switching to economics.
“I was too emotional. I couldn’t be detached from people,” she said of her time in the hospital. “I was in tears a lot of times.”
As someone who loved math and loved understanding how money worked, she went into banking. “I got into banking because banks are always going to be here — so I thought,” she said. “And I thrived. I started off as a teller, but then I went to a larger financial institution. I managed over 55 people, and I found that managing people was a strength of mine.”
“It was only when we got to 2008, when we had to start laying off people, that I realized I’m back in this emotional state with people because it was so hard,” she said, recounting how she had to give out pink slips to people she had worked with for so many years. “I came out of that really not knowing what I wanted to do next.”
She went back to school for her MBA while still working as an assistant vice president at Northern Trust/Fiserve, where she oversaw the back office. Along the way, technology made her redundant, and after completing her MBA, she got a job as an operations analyst at Chicago Teachers’ Pension Fund (CTPF) in 2010.
Angela Miller-May was eventually promoted to private markets portfolio manager, then to director of investments before becoming CIO (chief investment officer).
“I saw somebody who was well grounded into the day-to-day operations of a pension fund, and then also had the breadth of knowledge to work at the strategic allocation level,” her employer Chuck Burbridge recalled. “She is a very, very diligent, measured individual. She won’t be the first person to come and answer the question, but when she does answer the question it’ll be a good answer.”
In 2021, Angela Miller-May landed her current position as chief investment officer of the Illinois Municipal Retirement Fund (IMRF). She manages just over $55 billion ($55.2B as of Q1 2025) in assets on behalf of more than 440,000 members across Illinois, according to Shoppe Black.
IMRF has been delivering strong results through turbulent markets since she became CIO, the platform added.
“After a downturn in 2022, the fund rebounded in 2023 with a 13.22% net return. That momentum carried into 2024, when IMRF posted a 9.2% net return, growing its portfolio from $52.1 billion to $54.9 billion and maintaining a healthy funded status of 96.4%,” Shoppe Black wrote.
“The positive trend continued into 2025. As of March 31, 2025, IMRF’s market value had reached $55.2 billion,” it added.
Being one of the few African American-women CIOs at U.S. public pension funds, Angela Miller-May is dedicated to championing diversity, equity and inclusion. At IMRF, she has built relationships with 81 women-, minority-, and disability-owned firms, which now manage $13.66 billion of the fund’s portfolio.
As part of her mission to support women and minority groups in the finance industry, she holds advisory and board roles with organizations including the Private Equity Women Investor Network (PEWIN), the NASP Africa Institutional Investors Advisory Council, First Women’s Bank, and Women Investment Professionals (WIP), Shoppe Black said.
Among her honors are being named one of Pensions & Investments’ 2023 Most Influential Women in Institutional Investing, receiving the Markets Group 2023 DEI Leadership Award, the NASP 2022 Pacesetter Award, and the Institutional Investor 2022 DEI Leadership Award, the platform added.
Indeed, at IMRF, Angela Miller-May has grown her brand. “She has continued to be able to be in the spotlight as a thought leader on investments and that doesn’t really come to IMRF historically,” Burbridge said. “That’s really Angela taking [it] to another level.”
