Miranda July

Miranda July is an American film director, screenwriter, actress, and author whose multidisciplinary practice spans independent cinema, performance art, and experimental literature. Born Miranda Jennifer Grossinger on February 15, 1974 in Barre, Vermont, she grew up in a family of writers—her parents founded North Atlantic Books—and was raised in Berkeley, California, where she began staging punk‑inflected plays at the legendary 924 Gilman Street. After a brief stint at UC Santa Cruz film school, she dropped out and moved to Portland, Oregon, immersing herself in the riot‑grrrl scene and launching the DIY video‑exchange project Joanie4Jackie, a precursor to her later collaborative installations. Her early one‑woman performance pieces earned a reputation for daring intimacy, and she has claimed never to have held a day job since age twenty‑three, subsisting on odd jobs such as waitressing and even stripping while she honed her artistic voice. July burst onto the feature‑film landscape with Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), a quirky romance that won the Caméra d’Or at Cannes and secured a Special Jury Prize at Sundance, establishing her as a singular voice obsessed with the politics of connection. She followed with The Future (2011), a whimsical yet unsettling exploration of desire that premiered at Sundance and earned a Berlin Golden Bear nomination, and later directed the heist‑drama Kajillionaire (2020), further expanding her narrative range. In parallel with her filmmaking, July has authored critically acclaimed collections such as No One Belongs Here More Than You (2007) and novels like The First Bad Man (2015) and All Fours (2024), each marked by her trademark blend of humor, vulnerability, and experimental structure. Her collaborative projects—including the online art platform Learning to Love You More, the sculptural Venice Biennale installation Eleven Heavy Things, and the iOS app Somebody—demonstrate a commitment to participatory, audience‑centered art that blurs the line between creator and viewer. Throughout her career she has been praised for foregrounding female perspectives while also confronting criticism that her work is overly niche or “twee,” a tension she addresses with self‑aware humor and a refusal to conform to conventional industry expectations. Today, July continues to influence independent cinema and contemporary art, while co‑parenting her child with filmmaker Mike Mills, after a long partnership that began at Sundance in 2005.