Still life is at the heart of her practice: in the 1980s her paintings featured ordinary objects depicted against an off-white ground. Subsequently her imagery expanded to depictions of objects within settings, including landscape, architecture and people. Milroy was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 2005 and is Head of Graduate Painting at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL since 2009. Her work is held in many major public and private collections.