Miranda July
Miranda July is an American film director, screenwriter, actress and author. Her body of work includes film, fiction, monologue, digital presentations and live performance art.
She wrote, directed and starred in the films Me and You and Everyone We Know and The Future and wrote and directed Kajillionaire. She has authored a book of short stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You ; a collection of nonfiction short stories, It Chooses You ; and the novels The First Bad Man and All Fours.
Early life
July was born in Barre, Vermont, in 1974, the daughter of Lindy Hough and Richard Grossinger. Her parents are both writers who taught at Goddard College at the time. They were also the founders of North Atlantic Books, a publisher of alternative health, martial arts, and spiritual titles. Her father was Jewish, and her mother was Protestant. Her family also dabbled in New Age religion and discussed spirituality while she was growing up.July was encouraged to work on her short fiction by author Rick Moody. She was raised in Berkeley, California, where she first began staging plays at 924 Gilman Street, a local punk rock club. She attended The College Preparatory School in Oakland for high school. She describes the experience as overwhelming. As a teenager, July wrote and directed a play called The Lifers, which was based on her correspondence with a man incarcerated for murder. She went on to stage it in punk clubs. She later attended the film school at University of California Santa Cruz, but dropped out during her second year and moved to Portland, Oregon.
Career beginnings
After relocating to Portland, Oregon, she began doing one-woman performance art shows. Her performances were successful. Portland is also where she began participating in the riot grrrl scene.In the early stages of her film career, she created several small video projects and performances years prior to her debut feature film, Me and You and Everyone We Know. During this time, July also worked as a waitress, a tastemaker for Coca-Cola, a locksmith, and a stripper.
Film
''Joanie4Jackie''
July was immersed in the riot grrrl scene in Portland and motivated by its do-it-yourself ethos, and she began an effort that she described as "a free alternative distribution system for women movie-makers". One of July's reasons for starting the project was to apply the concepts of riot grrrl into the filmmaking world. The idea was to connect as many women artists as possible, let them see each other's work, and foster a sense of community. Participants sent a self-made short film to July, who mailed back a compilation videotape containing that film and nine others – a "chainletter tape". When it began in 1995, the project was called Big Miss Moviola but was soon renamed Joanie4Jackie. July's first film, Atlanta, appears on the second tape of the series. July ran the project for seven years, handing it off to the film department of Bard College in 2003.In spring 2016, July donated an archive of Joanie4Jackie to the Getty Research Institute. The collection includes more than 200 titles from the 1990s and 2000s, videos from Joanie4Jackie events, booklets, posters, hand-written letters from participants, and other documentation. Thomas W. Gaehtgens, the director of the Getty Research Institute, stated that the acquisition is "an esteemed addition to our Special Collections that connects to work by many important 20th century artists who are also represented in our archives, such as Eleanor Antin, Yvonne Rainer and Carolee Schneemann."
''The Amateurist''
July's film The Amateurist follows a researcher examining via a video monitor a more conventionally beautiful woman; July plays both roles. July wrote, directed, and starred in the film. The film won the Cinematexas Best Experimental and No Budget Awards 1999, New York Expo 1999 Silver Award Experimental, and San Francisco Golden Gate Award Silver Spire 2000.''Nest of Tens''
In October 2000, July released Nest of Tens. The 27-minute video, juxtaposes four unrelated scenarios in which "seemingly everyday people go about acting completely normal while demonstrating distinct abnormality." July wrote and directed the film with Polly Bilchuk in the starring role. Nest of Tens has been placed in the permanent online collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Nest of Tens won the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen's main prize in 2001 and the Cinematexas International Short Film Festival's Gecko Award in 2000.''Me and You and Everyone We Know''
Filmmaker rated July number one in their "25 New Faces of Indie Film" in 2004. After winning a slot in a Sundance workshop, she developed her first feature-length film, Me and You and Everyone We Know, which premiered in 2005.The film won the Caméra d'Or prize at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival as well as the Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, Best First Feature at the Philadelphia Film Festival, Feature Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature at the San Francisco International Film Festival, and Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature at the Los Angeles Film Festival.
''The Future''
July's second film was originally titled "Satisfaction" but was later renamed The Future, with July in a lead role. The film premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for a Golden Bear at the 61st Berlin International Film Festival.''Kajillionaire''
In March 2018, it was announced July would write and direct a heist film produced by Plan B Entertainment and Annapurna Pictures. That same month, Evan Rachel Wood, Richard Jenkins, Debra Winger and Gina Rodriguez joined the cast of the film. In June 2018, Mark Ivanir joined the cast of the film. Principal photography began in May 2018. Its theatrical release was on September 25, 2020.Other film work
consulted with July about aspects of his 2001 feature-length film The Center of the World, for which she received a story credit. July appears as herself in the 2017 documentary Turn It Around: The Story of East Bay Punk. She was interviewed for the film !Women Art Revolution. July narrates the documentary Fire of Love.Music and spoken word
July recorded her first EP for Kill Rock Stars in 1996, titled Margie Ruskie Stops Time, with music by The Need. She released two full-length LPs, 10 Million Hours A Mile in 1997 and The Binet-Simon Test in 1998, both on Kill Rock Stars. She collaborated with Calvin Johnson in his musical project Dub Narcotic Sound System, and in 1999 she made a split EP with IQU, released on Johnson's K Records.Acting
July has acted in many of her own short films, including Atlanta, The Amateurist, Nest of Tens, Are You The Favorite Person of Anyone?, and her feature-length films Me and You and Everyone We Know and The Future. She also made an appearance in the film Jesus' Son. She appeared in an episode of Portlandia in 2012. She co-starred in Josephine Decker's 2018 feature film, Madeline's Madeline.Live performance pieces
In 1998, July made Love Diamond, her first full-length multimedia performance piece – in her description, a "live movie." This two-hour stage work featured July playing multiple characters, humorously depicting women's perceived cultural roles. This was followed by a second full-length performance piece, The Swan Tool, and a six-minute film, Getting Stronger Every Day. The latter is an abstract view of a grown man and a little girl, seemingly taunted by indistinct floating shapes while an offscreen narrator recounts a tale of real-life pedophilia. The Swan Tool is another "live movie", a one-woman show in which July plays Lisa Cobb, a woman searching for her lost body. Although it's peppered with deadpan comedy, the surrealist story concerns "childhood sexual traumas, adult alienation, and persistent, unfocused guilt."In 2006, after completing her first feature film, she went on to create another multimedia piece, Things We Don't Understand and Definitely Are Not Going To Talk About, which she performed in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York. This stage show contained several ideas that would become key elements of her later film, The Future.
In March 2015, July premiered her performance work New Society as part of the 58th San Francisco International Film Festival. In the program for the performance, July requested the audience not share details of the show, stating it is now "a rare sensation to sit down in a theater with no idea what will happen."
Other art projects
With artist Harrell Fletcher, July founded the online art project Learning to Love You More. The project's website offered assignments to artists whose submissions became part of "an ever-changing series of exhibitions, screenings and radio broadcasts presented all over the world." Over 8,000 people participated in the project. In addition to its internet presentations, Learning to Love You More also compiled exhibitions for the Whitney Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, and other hosts. A book version of the project's online art was released in 2007. Starting on May 1, 2009 the project's website stopped accepting assignment submissions. In 2010, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art acquired the website, to preserve it as an archive of the project online.July constructed a sculptural exhibition, Eleven Heavy Things, for the 2009 Venice Biennale. Its assortment of cartoonish shapes, made sturdy with fiberglass and steel, were designed for playful interaction by visitors. The exhibition was also shown in New York City at Union Square Park and in Los Angeles at the MOCA Pacific Design Center.
In 2013, she organized We Think Alone, an art project involving the private emails of public figures. Unredacted except for the recipients' names, the emails were freely donated by a disparate group of notable persons including author Sheila Heti, theoretical physicist Lee Smolin, basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and actress Kirsten Dunst. July grouped selected emails by topic, and sent a new set to the project's subscribers every week for 20 weeks. One reviewer described the emails as "simultaneously mundane and eerily revealing; they shed light on how people in the public eye craft their private identities... also underscore, in some way, the way all of us present ourselves over email: excessively formal or passive-aggressive, lovey-dovey, flakey, overly excited."
In 2014, July created Somebody, an iOS app which allows users to compose a message to be delivered to someone else in-person, or to deliver someone else's message in-person. When a user sends their friend a message through Somebody, it goes not to the friend but to the Somebody user nearest to the friend. This person delivers the message verbally, acting as a stand-in. The project was funded by Miu Miu. The app closed on October 31, 2015.
In 2019, July created an Instagram series starring herself and Margaret Qualley. The series depicted July and Qualley mediating a strained relationship over FaceTime videos and text conversations. It also included appearances by Jaden Smith, the suggestion of a "Hazion Circle" ritual, and Sharon Van Etten writing a song for them.
In 2022, July collaborated with Mack Books to create Services, a limited edition book sculpture composed of photographs and texts between July and Richie Jay Benedicto, a trans woman living in the Philippines who offered services to increase the readership of self-published authors. The first six months of July and Benedicto's correspondence, which coincided with the first six months of COVID-19 lockdowns in the United States, were published in the book. Only 25 copies were made available for sale.
For its fall 2024 campaign, Prada worked with July on "Now That We're Here", a photo series featuring Hunter Schafer, Letitia Wright, Damson Idris, Harris Dickinson, Ma Yili, and others encouraging people to call into a hotline where they could interact with pre-recorded scripts recorded by July.