Mira Nair mini-bio: Mira Nair (born October 15, 1957 at Rourkela, India) is an India-born, New York-based film director. Her production company is Mirabai Films.
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 works with longtime creative collaborator, screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala, whom she met at Harvard.
Mira Nair was born in Rourkela, Orissa, where her father (having his roots in Punjab) was employed. She was the youngest of three children from a middle-class family. Her father was a civil servant and her mother a social worker. Mira did her early schooling at Catholic schools, including Tara Hall in Shimla. 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, where she met her first husband Mitch Epstein, as well as Sooni Taraporevala.
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.
Salaam Bombay! (1988), screenplay by Sooni Taraporevala, was nominated for an Oscar for best foreign language film, and won many other awards. It is today considered a groundbreaking film classic, and is standard fare for film students.
The 1991 film Mississippi Masala starred Denzel Washington and Sarita Choudhury that profiled a family of displaced Ugandan-Indians living and working in Mississippi. The screenplay was also by Sooni Taraporevala.
My Own Country starring Naveen Andrews, was produced for HBO films, adapted from the novel by Abraham Verghese by Sooni Taraporevala.
Nair's most popular film to date, Monsoon Wedding (2001), a film about a chaotic Punjabi Indian wedding with a screenplay by Sabrina Dhawan, 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. Another premiere was held in fall 2006 with the Indo-American Cultural Council in New York. The Namesake, adapted by Sooni Taraporevala from the novel by Pulitzer prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri, was 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.
In fall of 2007, Nair will begin production on the big-budget Johnny Depp-starrer Shantaram in India, the U.K. and possibly Australia. Also having the credit of directing a film in pre-production New York, I Love You, a romantic-drama anthology of love stories set in New York.
Her future film Impressionist is a coming-of-age story set in the Raj of the 1920's. Pran Nath is able to bridge the enormous social and political divides of the time with a series of self re-inventions.
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.
Mira Nair will be honoured with "Pride of India" award at the 9th Bollywood Film Awards later this year for her contributions to the film industry.
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.
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