Mira Nair


Mira Nair is an Indian American filmmaker. She has received two prizes from the Cannes Film Festival and four from the Venice Film Festival, as well as nominations for an Academy Award, two BAFTA Awards, a Golden Globe, and two César Awards.
Nair began her career making documentaries, but went on to make feature films. She usually directs independent drama films, which she also produces through her company Mirabai Films, and her films often touch on political themes or controversial topics. She made her feature-length directorial debut with Salaam Bombay!, which received Academy Award, BAFTA Award, and Golden Globe Award nominations. Her next film, Mississippi Masala, was nominated for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Film.
Nair has directed films such as Monsoon Wedding, Vanity Fair, The Namesake, and Queen of Katwe. Monsoon Wedding made her the first female director to win the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best International Feature Film, and held the record for the highest-grossing Indian film in North America until 2017.
Born and raised in India, Nair moved to the U.S. to attend Harvard University, and was married to photographer Mitch Epstein from the early to late 1980s. She then lived for a few years in Uganda with her second husband, political scientist Mahmood Mamdani, but they later returned to the U.S. Their son, Zohran Mamdani, has served as Mayor of New York City since 2026.
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Early life

Mira Nair was born in Rourkela on 15 October 1957, the daughter of social worker Praveen Nair and Indian Administrative Service officer Amrit Lal Nair. She has two older brothers named Vikram and Gautam. The family is of Punjabi origin, now settled in Delhi, and is Hindu. The family name "Nayyar" was changed by her grandfather, although one of her uncles continues to use it.
Nair grew up in a "colonial-style bungalow, with spacious veranda and terracotta-tiled floor". Her father, Amrit, was a remote character, who was "not much fun", and her parents later separated, after years of tension and fighting. Nair appreciated Amrit's love of Persian poetry and song, but he drove his children hard, insisting that they "spend their time usefully". He also argued with her brothers, Vikram and Gautam, a lot, but being a girl, Mira was regarded as less important, and was allowed to just get on with doing what interested her. Praveen had a strong influence on the young Mira, particularly her independence, confidence, fearlessness, and social awareness. Nair did not directly challenge her father in the home, but in her early documentary films she attacked many of his attitudes, such as the hypocrisy of male ideas about "virtue" in India Cabaret, and the Indian custom by which female fetuses were often aborted, in Children of Desired Sex.
Nair first attended Ispat English Medium School in Rourkela, from ages 7 to 10, between 1964 and 1967. Her family moved to Bhubaneswar, where she lived until age 18. She attended an English-medium high school at Loreto Convent, Tara Hall in Kaithu, Shimla, where she developed a fondness for English literature.
In her teens, she taught herself to type and play the sitar; painted; wrote poetry and performed in local theatre, and was also an outstanding student.
She studied at Miranda House—a college for women at Delhi University—where she majored in sociology. While at university, she belonged to an amateur drama company in Delhi. There she worked with Indian theatre director Barry John. At university she performed in Equus, Habeas Corpus, and as Cleopatra in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. She also did political street theatre in Calcutta with the Bengali playwright Badal Sircar.
After turning down the offer of a full scholarship to Cambridge University in England in 1976, aged 19, she moved to the US to attend Harvard University on a scholarship. She enjoyed acting and continued to perform throughout her first year at Harvard. Her friend and future collaborator Sooni Taraporevala was a classmate at Harvard.
Heading to New York City during the summer break of her first year, she worked with American dramatist Joseph Chaikin and met Judith Malina and Julian Beck, who founded The Living Theatre.
Upon return to Harvard, she was admitted to the department of Visual and Environmental Studies based on her photographic submission. She attended the introductory photography course that was being taught by her future first husband, Mitch Epstein, in 1977, and she did some work for him on his freelance assignments. She, however, then dropped photography, preferring filmmaking. She graduated in 1979.

Career

Before she became a filmmaker, Nair was interested in acting. While in India, she performed in plays written by Badal Sircar, a Bengali dramatist and theatre director. While she studied film at Harvard, Nair also became involved in the theatre program. She won a Boylston Prize for her performance of Jocasta's speech from Seneca's Oedipus.
In 2002 Nair was interviewed by American theatre critic and biographer John Lahr, in which she shared much about her early life and career to this point.
In a 2004 interview with FF2 Media's Jan Huttner, Nair commented on her filmmaking process:
It's all in how I do it. Keeping the bums on the seats is very important to me. It requires that ineffable thing called rhythm and balance in movie-making. Foils have to be created, counter-weights. From the intimacy, let's say, of a love scene to the visceral, jugular quality of war. That shift is something in the editing, how one cuts from the intimate to the epic that keeps you there waiting. The energy propels you.

In an interview with Image Journal in 2017, Nair said that she had chosen directing over any other art form because it was collaborative. She said, "That's why I am neither a photographer nor writer, I like to work with people, and my strength, if any, is that. Working with life."

Documentaries

In her early years, Nair primarily made documentaries in which she explored Indian cultural traditions. For her film thesis at Harvard, between 1978 and 1979, she 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, using a Bolex camera. The film's name derives from a Muslim community near the Jama Masjid, a large mosque in Old Delhi.
After Nair graduated and moved to New York, American filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker, a pioneer of the cinéma vérité style of documentary filmmaking, liked Jama Masjid Street Journal and helped Nair secure a grant for her next film. Her second documentary, So Far from India, was a 52-minute film that follows an Indian newspaper dealer living in the subways of New York. His pregnant wife waits for him to return home to India. The protagonist, Ashok, slowly becomes estranged from not only his family, but also his Indian heritage. Nair directed So Far from India as a commentary on the life of an immigrant separated from his home and suffering cultural isolation. The film won Best Documentary at the American Film Festival in Wrocław, Poland and New York's Global Village Film Festival.
Her third documentary, India Cabaret, with cinematography by her husband Mitch Epstein, opened the inaugural Indian International Film Festival, in Hyderabad, in 1985. The film was very well received at the festival. It portrays the exploitation of female strippers in Bombay, and follows a customer who regularly visits a local strip club while his wife stays at home. Nair raised roughly $130,000 for the project. The 59-minute film was shot over a span of two months. India Cabaret was widely criticized, primarily by Indian men, who objected to the portrayal of women working as strippers or those who are forced to marry. In New York some opponents tried to block release of the film on WNET. The film was bought by PBS, but then rejected by Channel 13, the network's New York affiliate. Nair's family, especially her father, also criticized it. He said she should not have positively portrayed these women. Nair created India Cabaret to reveal the prejudice shown towards sex workers. Some feminists criticized her for filming these women through the male gaze, due to the sexual nature of the strip clubs. The film received several awards, including the Blue Ribbon award and two awards for Best Documentary.
Children of a Desired Sex was the fourth documentary Nair directed. Made for Canadian television, this film explored how amniocentesis was being used to determine the sex of fetuses. Additionally, the premise of the film seeks to bring to light the experiences of women who live in a society where there is a large preference towards giving birth to male children. Despite how controversial this topic may be, Nair highlighted the struggle and the dilemma these women go through.
Living in Cape Town, South Africa, for around three years while her second husband took up a post at the university there, Nair worked on scripts with her friend Sooni Taraporevala, and made a telemovie based on Abraham Verghese's book My Own Country: A Doctor's Story for Showtime. The film tells the story of Dr Verghese's real-life experiences in treating HIV/AIDS patients in East Tennessee. Nair also spent six weeks assisting children who lived in local townships to make films of their lives.
In 2001, with The Laughing Club of India, she explored yoga based on laughter. Its founder, 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.

Feature films

In June 1987, with Taraporevala, Nair researched and co-wrote Salaam Bombay!, which turned out to be an enormous and exhausting undertaking. 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. Mitch Epstein was co-producer and production designer on the film. They struggled to get financing, but eventually Nair "managed to cajole completion cash out of a French company". On 19 May 1988, three days after Nair had finished cutting the film, it had its world première at the closing gala at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival. It earned a 15-minute standing ovation, and won the Caméra d'Or and the Prix du public. It was nominated at the 1989 Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film. Although it did not do well at the box office, it won 23 international awards.
Nair and Taraporevala next worked together on the 1991 film Mississippi Masala, which told the story of Ugandan-born Indians in Mississippi. Their research for the film started in March 1989, and was their first visit to Africa. Nair met her second husband, Asian Ugandan academic Mahmood Mamdani, when she interviewed him in Nairobi after having read his book From Citizen to Refugee, about the expulsion of Asians. The film centers on a carpet-cleaner business owner who falls in love with the daughter of one of his Indian clients. The film revealed the prejudice in black and Indian communities. Mississippi Masala was heavily inspired by the history of Indian emigrants in Uganda. Nair was inspired by the fact that Ugandan-born Indians often aligned themselves more with white people, especially due to the worse treatment Black Ugandans endured. 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.
Her next feature, The Perez Family was not a success. The producer said that it had "too much plot", and a critic wrote, "It looks like a musical after all the songs have been cut out." The next one, Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love, which Nair later called "an aberration", also bombed. In that year, the family moved to South Africa for three years, where her career "stagnated".
Monsoon Wedding, written by Sabrina Dhawan, was filmed over only 30 days, using only a small crew, including some of Nair's acquaintances and relatives. Released in 2001, the film told the story of an Indian Punjabi wedding. In the end, 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 directed the 2002 television film, Hysterical Blindness for HBO. The film is a romance set 1987 starring Uma Thurman in the lead role. The made-for-TV movie would prove a success for both HBO and Thurman, with the latter receiving a Golden Globe for her acting in the film. This was followed by an adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray's epic Vanity Fair.
In 2005, Nair was asked to direct Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, but turned it down to work on The Namesake, reportedly after her son Zohran persuaded her that she was the only one who could direct the latter. 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. Next she directed the Amelia Earhart biopic Amelia, starring Hilary Swank and Richard Gere. The film predominantly received 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, starring Riz Ahmed, Kate Hudson, Liev Schreiber, and Kiefer Sutherland. It tells a post-9/11 story about the impact of the terrorist attacks on one Pakistani man and his treatment by Americans in reaction to them. It opened the 2012 Venice Film Festival in Venice, Italy to critical acclaim, and was released worldwide in early 2013. It did not do well at the box office.
Nair's 2016 film Queen of Katwe, a Disney production, starred Lupita Nyong'o and David Oyelowo, and was based on a biography of Ugandan chess prodigy Phiona Mutesi written by American author Tim Crothers. The film earned much acclaim. It had a budget of $15 million and grossed $10.4 million. Nair's son Zohran Mamdani appears as an extra in the film, and one of his songs performed under his rapper pseudonym Young Cardamom, "#1 Spice", also features in the film.
A book about Mira Nair's films was published 2018 by Amardeep Singh The Films of Mira Nair - Diaspora vérité. University Press of Mississippi, ISBN 9781496821164

Short films

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 a segment to the anthology film 11'09"01 September 11 in which 11 filmmakers reacted to the terrorist attack on New York on 11 September 2001. Her film dramatises a true story, of a New York Pakistani family whose son, Mohammad Salman Hamdani, missing after the event, was suspected by police and reported by press as being one of the terrorists. When his body was eventually found months later, it turned out that he had rushed to the scene to help people escape the wreckage, and was killed himself.
Other titles include How Can It Be?, Migration, New York, I Love You and her collaboration with among others, Emir Kusturica and Guillermo Arriaga on the anthology film Words with Gods.

Other work

A long-time 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 the nonprofit facility with the motto that "If we don't tell our stories, no one else will". As of 2018 Maisha was building a school with architect Raul Pantaleo, winner of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, and his company, Studio Tamassociati.
In 1998, Nair 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 in Manhattan. 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 that Nair would direct a ten-episode TV series for Disney+ reimagining the National Treasure series with a new cast.

Personal life

In 1977, Nair met her first husband, photographer Mitch Epstein, when taking photography classes at Harvard University. He was her lecturer, and they married in 1981 in India, in a traditional Punjabi wedding, despite Epstein being "a Jewish boy from Holyoke, Massachusetts." They were together for 12 years, of which they were married for 8. They divorced around 1989.
On 29 March 1989, Nair met her second husband, Indo-Ugandan political scientist Mahmood Mamdani, in Nairobi, Kenya, while doing research for the film Mississippi Masala. She had read his book From Citizen to Refugee, about the expulsion of Asians. Nair moved in with Mamdani on campus at Makerere University, where he was teaching. They married in 1991, and their son, Zohran Mamdani, was born in Kampala, Uganda, in the same year. In 1996 the family moved to Cape Town, South Africa, for Mahmood to take up an appointment as head of the African studies program at the University of Cape Town, where they lived for around three years.
In 2020, her son, Zohran Mamdani, won a seat representing Astoria, Queens, in the New York State Assembly. He became the Mayor of New York City on 1 January 2026.
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.

Political views

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 posts on Twitter, Nair wrote: "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 stand w/ Palestine for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel & the larger BDS Mov't." Nair was praised by PACBI, which said her decision to boycott Israel "helps to highlight the struggle against colonialism and apartheid."

Recognition and awards

At the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards 1988, Nair was awarded the New Generation Award, a career achievement award, by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.
In 2012, Nair was awarded India's third highest civilian award, the Padma Bhushan, by then president of India, Pratibha Patil.

Films

Many of Nair's films have won awards, including:
Many of her films have also been nominated for some significant awards; a selection of these follow.