Mira Nair

Mira Nair (born 15 October 1957) is an Indian-American filmmaker based in New York City. Her production company is Mirabai Films. Among her films are Mississippi Masala, The Namesake, the Golden Lion–winning Monsoon Wedding, and Salaam Bombay!, which received nominations for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and the BAFTA Award for Best Film Not in the English Language.
Nair was born in Rourkela, Orissa, India, and grew up with her two older brothers and parents in Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India. Her father, Amrit Lal Nair, was an officer of the Indian Administrative Service, and her mother, Parveen Nayyar, was a social worker.
She lived in Bhubaneswar until age 18, and attended a convent, following which she left to attend Loreto Convent, Tara Hall, Shimla, an Irish-Catholic missionary school, where she developed an infatuation with English literature. Nair then went on to study at Miranda House at Delhi University, where she majored in sociology. Nair applied for transfer and, at 19, she attended Harvard University on a scholarship. She concentrated in Visual and Environmental Studies, with a focus on documentary filmmaking, and graduated in 1979.
Before she became a filmmaker, Nair was originally interested in acting, and at one point she performed plays written by Badal Sarkar, a Bengali performer. While she studied at Harvard University, Nair became involved in the theater program and won a Boylston Prize for her performance of Jocasta's speech from Seneca's Oedipus.
Nair commented on film-making in a 2004 interview with FF2 Media's Jan Huttner:
Nair said to Image Journal in 2017 that she chose directing over any other art form because it was collaborative. "That’s why I am neither a photographer nor writer," she said. "I like to work with people, and my strength, if any, is that. Working with life."
At the start of her film-making career, Nair primarily made documentaries in which she explored Indian cultural tradition. For her film thesis at Harvard between 1978 and 1979, Nair produced a black-and-white film titled Jama Masjid Street Journal. In the 18-minute film, Nair explored the streets of Old Delhi and had casual conversations with Indian locals.
In 1982, she made her second documentary titled So Far from India, which is a 52-minute film that followed an Indian newspaper dealer living in the subways of New York, while his pregnant wife waited for him to return home. This film was recognized as a Best Documentary winner at the American Film Festival and New York's Global Village Film Festival.
Her third documentary, India Cabaret, released in 1984, revealed the exploitation of female strippers in Bombay, and followed a customer who regularly visited a local strip club while his wife stayed at home. Nair raised roughly $130,000 for the project. The 59-minute film was shot over a span of two months. It was criticized by Nair's family. Her fourth and last documentary, made for Canadian television, explored how amniocentesis was being used to determine the sex of fetuses.
In 2001, with The Laughing Club of India, she explored laughter based on yoga. Founder Dr. Madan Kararia spoke of the club's history and the growth of laughing clubs across the country, and subsequently the world. The documentary included testimonials from members of the laughter clubs who described how the practice had improved or changed their lives. Its featured segments included a group of workers in an electrical products factory in Mumbai who took time off to laugh during their coffee break.
In 1983 with her friend Sooni Taraporevala, Nair co-wrote Salaam Bombay!. Nair sought out real "street children" to more authentically portray the lives of children who survived in the streets and were deprived of a true childhood. Though the film did not do well at the box office, it won 23 international awards, including the Camera D’or and Prix du Public at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival. It was nominated at the 1989 Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film.
Nair and Taraporevala next worked together on the 1991 film Mississippi Masala, which told the story of Ugandan-born Indians displaced in Mississippi. The film centers on a carpet-cleaner business owner (Denzel Washington) who falls in love with the daughter (Sarita Choudhury) of one of his Indian clients. The film revealed the prejudice in African-American and Indian communities. It was well received by critics, earned a standing ovation at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival, and won three awards at the Venice Film Festival.
Nair went on to direct four more films before she produced Monsoon Wedding. Released in 2001, the film told the story of a Punjabi Indian wedding, written by Sabrina Dhawan. Employing a small crew and casting some of Nair's acquaintances and relatives, the film grossed over $30 million worldwide. The film was awarded the Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival, making Nair the first female recipient of the award. Nair then directed the Golden Globe-winning Hysterical Blindness (2002), followed by making William Makepeace Thackeray's epic Vanity Fair (2004).
In 2007, Nair was asked to direct Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, but turned it down to work on The Namesake. Based on the book by Pulitzer Prize-winner Jhumpa Lahiri, Sooni Taraporevala's screenplay follows the son of Indian immigrants who wants to fit in with New York City society, but struggles to get away from his family's traditional ways. The film was presented with the Dartmouth Film Award and was also honored with the Pride of India award at the Bollywood Movie Awards.
This was followed by the Amelia Earhart biopic Amelia (2009), starring Hilary Swank and Richard Gere. The film received predominantly negative reviews. It was also a box-office bomb, grossing $19.6 million against a budget of $40 million.
In 2012, Nair directed The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a thriller based on the best-selling novel by Mohsin Hamid. It received mixed reviews from critics, and was a box office bomb, earning only $2.1 million worldwide on a $15 million budget. It opened the 2012 Venice Film Festival to critical acclaim and was released worldwide in early 2013. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature questioned "how the ambivalence and provocativeness of the 'source' text translates into the film adaptation, and the extent to which the film format makes the narrative more palatable and appealing to wider audiences as compared to the novel’s target readership."
Nair's 2016 film Queen of Katwe, a Walt Disney Pictures production, starred Lupita Nyong'o and David Oyelowo and was based on the story of Ugandan chess prodigy Phiona Mutesi. It had a budget of $15 million, and grossed $10.4 million.
Nair's short films include A Fork, a Spoon and a Knight, inspired by the Nelson Mandela quote, ″Difficulties break some men but make others.″ She contributed to 11'09"01 September 11 (2002) in which 11 filmmakers reacted to the events of 11 September 2001. Other titles include How Can It Be? (2008), Migration (2008), New York, I Love You (2009) and her collaboration with, among others, Emir Kusturica and Guillermo Arriaga on the compilation feature Words with Gods.
A longtime activist, Nair set up an annual film-makers' laboratory, Maisha Film Lab in Kampala, Uganda. Since 2005, young directors in East Africa have been trained at this non-profit facility with the belief that "If we don't tell our stories, no one else will". Maisha as of 2018 was building a school with Architect Raul Pantaleo, winner of Aga Khan Award for Architecture, and his company Studio Tamassociati.
In 1998, she used the profits from Salaam Bombay! to create the Salaam Baalak Trust which works with street children in India.
A musical adaptation of Monsoon Wedding, directed by Nair, premiered at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, running from 5 May to 16 July 2017.
As of 2015, she lived in New York City, where she was an adjunct professor in the Film Division of the School of Arts for Columbia University. The university had a collaboration with Nair's Maisha Film Lab, and offered opportunities for international students to work together and share their interests in film-making.
In July 2020, journalist Ellen Barry announced that her Pulitzer Prize-nominated story "The Jungle Prince of Delhi" about the "royal family of Oudh", published in The New York Times, would be adapted into a web series for Amazon Studios by Nair.
In March 2021 it was announced Nair would direct a ten episode TV series for Disney+ reimagining the National Treasure series with a new cast.
In 1977, Nair met her first husband, photographer Mitch Epstein, when taking photography classes at Harvard University. They divorced by 1987.
In 1988 Nair met her second husband, Indo-Ugandan political scientist Mahmood Mamdani, while in Uganda doing research for the film Mississippi Masala. Like his wife, Mamdani teaches at Columbia University. Their son, Zohran Mamdani, was born in Uganda in 1991. In 2020, Zohran won a seat representing Astoria, Queens, in the New York State Assembly after defeating incumbent Assembly member Aravella Simotas in the Democratic primary election earlier in the year. He is running for the office of mayor of New York City in 2025.
Nair has been an enthusiastic yoga practitioner for decades; when making a film, she has the cast and crew start the day with a yoga session.
In July 2013, Nair declined an invitation to the Haifa International Film Festival as a "guest of honor" to protest Israel's policies toward Palestine. In postings on her Twitter account, Nair stated "I will go to Israel when the walls come down. I will go to Israel when occupation is gone...I will go to Israel when the state does not privilege one religion over another. I will go to Israel when Apartheid is over. I will go to Israel, soon. I stand w/ Palestine for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) & the larger Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) Mov’t." Nair was subsequently praised by PACBI, which stated that her decision to boycott Israel "helps to highlight the struggle against colonialism and apartheid." She subsequently tweeted "I will go to Israel, soon."
Documentary films
TV movies
Feature films
Short films
TV series
She was awarded the India Abroad Person of the Year-2007. In 2012 she was awarded India's third highest civilian award the Padma Bhushan by President of India, Pratibha Patil.