Mira Nair: Encyclopedia II - Mira Nair - Biography

Mira Nair - Biography

Mira Nair was born in Bhubaneshwar, Orissa, India, the youngest of three children from a middle-class family. Her father was a civil servant and her mother a social worker. She did her schooling in Bhubaneswar and Simla. 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.

At the beginning of her career as a film artist, Nair directed four documentaries; India Cabaret, about the lives of strippers in a Bombay nightclub, won the award at the American Film Festival in 1986. Her last master work Monsoon Wedding, a film about a chaotic Punjabi Indian wedding, was awarded the prestigious Golden Lion award at the Venice film festival.

She currently teaches at Columbia University in New York City and is married to the academic Mahmoud Mamdani. 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.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Biography", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki