Indian film Director and Producer based in New York

Mira Nair (born October 15, 1957) is an Indian film director and producer based in New York. Her production company is Mirabai Films.She was educated at Delhi University and Harvard University. Her debut feature film, Salaam Bombay! (1988), won the Golden Camera award at the Cannes Film Festival and also earned the nomination for Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. She used the proceeds of the film, to establish an organization for street children, called the Salaam Baalak Trust in India.She often works with longtime creative collaborator, screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala, whom she met at Harvard.

 

She has won a number of awards, including a National Film Award and various international film festival awards, and was a nominee at the Academy Awards, Golden Globes, BAFTA Awards and Filmfare Awards. She was also awarded the India Abroad Person of the Year-2007, which was presented by Indra Nooyi, Chairperson and CEO, PepsiCo, Inc, and India Abroad Person of the Year-2006.Her most recent films included Vanity Fair with Reese Witherspoon, The Namesake, and Amelia.

Mira Nair, a Punjabi, was born in Rourkela, Orissa where her father 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 a boarding school, Loreto Convent Tara Hall in Shimla, Himachal Pradesh. She studied sociology at Miranda House, Delhi University, where she became involved in political street theater and performed for three years in an amateur drama company. In 1976, at age 19 she left for the US with a scholarship at Harvard University, where she continued her studies in sociology.While at Harvard she met her first husband, photographer Mitch Epstein, as well as her screenwriter, Sooni Taraporevala and gradually moved towards making documentary films.

At the beginning of her career as a film artist, Nair directed four television documentaries. India Cabaret, a film about the lives of strippers in a Bombay nightclub, won the Blue Ribbon award at the 1986 American Film Festival. Salaam Bombay! (1988), with a screenplay by Sooni Taraporevala, was nominated for an Academy Award 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.

She directed a short film in New York, I Love You, a romantic-drama anthology of love stories set in New York and a 12-minute movie on AIDS awareness (funded by The Gates Foundation) called Migration.Her biographical film Amelia was released in October 2009 to predominantly negative reviews.For several years, Nair was attached to a big-budget adaptation of the novel Shantaram, but the production was shelved in 2009. Nair has also purchased the rights to Mohsin Hamid's 2007 novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

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.Nair and her husband first met in 1988, when she went to Uganda for the first time to research for the film Mississippi Masala. 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.Nair has one son named Zohran.