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Mira Nair (born October 15 1957 at Bhubaneswar, Orissa) is an India-born, New York-based film director. She 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.

Biography

Mira Nair was born in Bhubaneswar 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 1991 film Mississippi Masala starred Denzel Washington and profiled a family of displaced Ugandan-Indians living and working in Mississippi.

Her master work, Monsoon Wedding (2001), a film about a chaotic Punjabi Indian wedding, was awarded the prestigious Golden Lion award at the Venice film festival.

Her 2004 version of Thackeray's novel, Vanity Fair, starred Reese Witherspoon.

Her latest film, The Namesake, premiered in the fall of 2006 at Dartmouth College where Ms. Nair was presented with the Dartmouth Film Award. The Dartmouth Film Award, established in 1979, honors outstanding contributors to film and filmmaking. Previous winners have included Johnny Depp, Robert Redford, Liv Ullman, Ken Burns, Ang Lee, Glenn Close, and Meryl Streep. The Namesake will be released in March of 2007.

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.

She is also in pre-production for the upcoming film, Gangsta M.D.. This film will be a remake of the Bollywood blockbuster, Munna Bhai M.B.B.S., a film in the Munna Bhai series.

Nair lives near Columbia University in New York City where she is an adjunct professor in the Film Division of the School of Arts and where her husband, Professor Mahmood Mamdani, also teaches ([1]).

Filmography

• Gangsta M.D. (2007) - based upon the Bollywood hit, Munna Bhai M.B.B.S.
• The Namesake (2006)
• 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)

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

See also

• Walter Salles
• Samira Makhmalbaf

External links

• Mirabai Films - Official website of Mira Nair and her production. Site contains biography, photos, etc
• SAWNET biography
• Biography
• Maisha Film Lab in Kampala, Uganda
• A Conversation with Mira Nair - Harvard @ Home program
• featured profile of Mira Nair - on GaramChai.com

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