Mira Nair

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Mira Nair (born October 15, 1957) is a New York-based Indian film director.

She was born in Orissa, India, and was educated at Delhi University and Harvard University. Her debut feature film, Salaam Bombay!, won the Golden Camera award at the Cannes Film Festival and was also nominated for an Oscar. She often collaborates with screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala.

1 Biography
2 Filmography
3 Literature
4 See also
5 External links

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Biography

Mira Nair was born in Bhubaneshwar, Orissa, where her father was employed. She was the youngest of three children from a middle-class Punjabi family. Her father was a civil servant and her mother a social worker. Mira did her early schooling at Catholic schools.

She studied sociology in Delhi University, where she became involved in political street theater and performed for three years in an amateur drama company. She left for the US at age 19 with a scholarship at Harvard.

At the beginning of her career as a film artist, Nair directed four documentaries. India Cabaret, a film about the lives of strippers in a Bombay nightclub, won the award at the American Film Festival in 1986. Her last master work Monsoon Wedding, a film about a chaotic Punjabi Indian wedding, was awarded the prestigious Golden Lion award at the Venice film festival.

She lives near Columbia University in New York City where her husband, Professor Mahmoud Mamdani, teaches.

Her latest project is Maisha, a film lab to help East Africans and South Asians learn to make films. Maisha is headquartered in Nair's adopted home of Kampala, Uganda.

Her latest film, The Namesake, will be released in the fall of 2006. After that, her next project will be a film called Gangsterm, MD featuring Chris Tucker as a man who lies to his parents about being a doctor and then, once his ruse is revealed, actually attends medical school. It is an adaptation of Munnabhai MBBS.

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Filmography

The Namesake
Vanity Fair (2004)
11'9''01 September 11 (2002) ("India" section)
Hysterical Blindness (2002) (TV) (for HBO)
Monsoon Wedding (2001)
The Laughing Club of India (1999) (TV)
My Own Country (1998) (TV)
Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love (1996)
The Perez Family (1995)
Mississippi Masala (1991)
Salaam Bombay! (1988)
Children of a Desired Sex (1987) (TV)
India Cabaret (1985) (TV)
So Far from India (1982)
Jama Masjid Street Journal (1979)

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Literature

Jigna Desai: Beyond Bollywood: The cultural politics of South Asian diasporic film. New York: Routledge, 2004, 280 pp. ill. ISBN 0-415-96684-1 (inb.) / ISBN 0-415-96685-X (hft.)
Gita Rajan: "Pliant and compliant: colonial Indian art and postcolonial cinema". Women. Oxford (Print), ISSN 0957-4042 ; 13(2002):1, pp. 48–69.
Alpana Sharma: "Body matters: the politics of provocation in Mira Nair's films". QRFV : Quarterly review of film and video, ISSN 1050-9208 ; 18(2001):1, pp. 91–103.
Pratibha Parmar: "Mira Nair: filmmaking in the streets of Bombay". Spare rib, ISSN 0306-7971; 198, 1989, pp. 28–29.
Gwendolyn Audrey Foster: Women Filmmakers of the African and Asian Diaspora: Decolonizing the Gaze, Locating Subjectivity. Carbondale, Ill. : Southern Illinois University Press, 1997. ISBN 0-8093-2120-3