Mira Nair was born on October 15, 1957 in Rourkela, India. Mira nair is an Indian-American film director and producer based in New York. Her production company is Mirabai Films. Mira nair was educated at Delhi University and Harvard University. Her debut feature film, Salaam Bombay! In 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.
Mira nair often works with longtime creative collaborator, screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala, whom she met at Harvard. Nair 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. Mira nair 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-2006Mira Nair was born in Rourkela, Orissa, where her Punjabi father, Nayyar, she spells her surname Nair having his roots in Amritsar, Punjab was employed.
Mira nair was the youngest of three children from a middle-class Hindu family. Her father was a civil servant and her mother a social worker. Mira did her early schooling at a boarding school in Shimla. She studied sociology in 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, where she continued her studies in sociology. While at Harvard she met her husband, photographer Mitch Epstein, as well as her screenwriter, Sooni Taraporevala and gradually moved towards making documentary films.
Nair directed four documentaries. India Cabaret, a film about the lives of strippers in a Bombay nightclub, won an award at the American Film Festival in 1986.Salaam Bombay! 1988, with a screenplay by Sooni Taraporevala, was nominated for an Oscar 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.
The 1991 film Mississippi Masala starred Denzel Washington and Sarita Choudhury, and profiled a family of displaced Ugandan-Indians living and working in Mississippi. The screenplay was again by Sooni Taraporevala, and produced by Michael Nozik. In 1995 her film adaption of the book The Perez Family, by Christine Bell, was released. The film starred Marisa Tomei, Alfred Molina, and Angelica Huston, and was again produced by Michael Nozik.
Mira nair was also the director of the movie Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love, a provocative movie set in 16th century India. My Own Country starring Naveen Andrews, was produced for HBO films, adapted from the memoir by Abraham Verghese by Sooni Taraporevala. Nair’s most popular film to date, Monsoon Wedding 2001, about a chaotic Punjabi Indian wedding with a screenplay by Sabrina Dhawan, was awarded the prestigious Golden Lion award at the Venice film festival. Her 2004 version of Thackeray’s novel, Vanity Fair, starred Reese Witherspoon.