1. Mira Nair was born on 15 October 1957 and is an Indian-American filmmaker based in New York City.
20 Facts About Mira Nair
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Mira Nair's father, Amrit Lal Nair, was an officer of the Indian Administrative Service, and her mother, Parveen Nayyar, was a social worker.
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Mira Nair 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.
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Mira Nair applied for transfer and, at 19, she attended Harvard University on a scholarship.
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Mira Nair concentrated in Visual and Environmental Studies, with a focus on documentary filmmaking, and graduated in 1979.
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Mira Nair commented on film-making in a 2004 interview with FF2 Media's Jan Huttner:.
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Mira Nair said to Image Journal in 2017 that she chose directing over any other art form because it was collaborative.
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At the start of her film-making career, Mira Nair primarily made documentaries in which she explored Indian cultural tradition.
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Mira 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.
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Mira Nair and Taraporevala next worked together on the 1991 film Mississippi Masala, which told the story of Ugandan-born Indians displaced in Mississippi.
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Mira Nair went on to direct four more films before she produced Monsoon Wedding.
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Mira Nair then directed the Golden Globe-winning Hysterical Blindness, followed by making William Makepeace Thackeray's epic Vanity Fair.
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In 2007, Mira Nair was asked to direct Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, but turned it down to work on The Namesake.
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In 2012, Mira Nair directed The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a thriller based on the best-selling novel by Mohsin Hamid.
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In 1977, Mira Nair met her first husband, photographer Mitch Epstein, when taking photography classes at Harvard University.
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In 1988 Mira Nair met her second husband, Indo-Ugandan political scientist Mahmood Mamdani, while in Uganda doing research for the film Mississippi Masala.
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Mira Nair is running for the office of mayor of New York City in 2025.
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Mira 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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In July 2013, Mira Nair declined an invitation to the Haifa International Film Festival as a "guest of honor" to protest Israel's policies toward Palestine.
20.
Mira Nair was awarded the India Abroad Person of the Year-2007.