Mira Nair (born October 15, 1957) is a New York-based Indian film director. She was born in India and attended Delhi University and Harvard. Her debut feature film, Salaam Bombay! won the directors award at the Cannes Film Festival and was also nominated for an Oscar.

Biography

Mira Nair was born in Bhubaneshwar, Orissa, the youngest of three children from a middle-class family. Her father was a civil servant and her mother a social worker. She did her schooling in Bhubaneswar and Simla. She studied sociology in Delhi University . Here, 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 she directed four documentaries. "India Cabaret", 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 currently teaches at Columbia University in New York.

Filmography

• "Vanity Fair" (2004)
• "9'11''01 September 11 (2002) (part called "India")
• "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 p. 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, s. 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, s. 91-103
• Pratibha Parmar: "Mira Nair : filmmaking in the streets of Bombay". In: Spare rib, ISSN 0306-7971 ; 198, 1989, s. 28-29
• Gwendolyn Audrey Foster: "Women filmmakers of the African and Asian diaspora : decolonizing the gaze, locating subjectivity". Carbondale, Ill : Southern Illinois University Press, cop. 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
• IMDb entry - IMDb entry for Mira Nair