Miranda July

Miranda July (born Miranda Jennifer Grossinger; February 15, 1974) is an American film director, screenwriter, actress and author.

Her body of work includes film, fiction, monologue, digital presentations and live performance art.

July was born in Barre, Vermont, in 1974, the daughter of Lindy Hough and Richard Grossinger.

Her parents are both writers who taught at Goddard College at the time.

They were also the founders of North Atlantic Books, a publisher of alternative health, martial arts, and spiritual titles.

Her father was Jewish, and her mother was Protestant.

July is the cousin of American ballerina Skylar Brandt.

July was encouraged to work on her short fiction by author Rick Moody.

She was raised in Berkeley, California, where she first began staging plays at 924 Gilman Street, a local punk rock club.

She attended The College Preparatory School in Oakland for high school.

When she was 16, she wrote and directed The Lifers, a play for which she cast 20 Latina women.

She describes this as an experience that pushed her heavily.

She later attended the film school at University of California Santa Cruz, but she dropped out during her second year, moving to Portland.

She relocated to Portland, Oregon, and took up performance art, or "one woman shows".

Her performances were successful; she has been quoted as saying she has not worked a day job since she was 23 years old.

In an interview for the Tate, she explains that she still tries to practice performance, partially due to its stark differences from filmmaking, such as its live audience or how "present" it is in comparison.

Portland is also where she began participating in the riot grrrl scene that was beginning to grow in the early 1990s.

In the early stages of her film career, she created several small video projects and performances years prior to her feature film, Me and You and Everyone We Know. However, while she worked on her art, July had to work several odd jobs; she worked as a waitress, a tastemaker for Coca-Cola, a locksmith, and a stripper.

July was immersed in the riot grrl scene in Portland and motivated by its do-it-yourself ethos, and she began an effort that she described as "a free alternative distribution system for women movie-makers".

One of July's reasons for starting the project was to apply the concepts of riot grrrl into the filmmaking world.

The idea was to connect as many women artists as possible, let them see each other's work, and foster a sense of community.

Participants sent a self-made short film to July, who mailed back a compilation videotape containing that film and nine others – a "chainletter tape".

The collection includes more than 200 titles from the 1990s and 2000s, videos from Joanie4Jackie events, booklets, posters, hand-written letters from participants, and other documentation.

Thomas W. Gaehtgens, the director of the Getty Research Institute, stated that the acquisition is "an esteemed addition to our Special Collections that connects to work by many important 20th century artists who are also represented in our archives, such as Eleanor Antin, Yvonne Rainer and Carolee Schneemann."

When it began in 1995, the project was called Big Miss Moviola but was soon renamed Joanie4Jackie.

July also credits the project to the loneliness she was experiencing at the time, but felt she learned from the project immensely, saying "that was my film school".

July's first film, Atlanta, appears on the second tape of the series.

July continued to run the project for years, handing it off to the film department of Bard College in 2003.

Filmmaker rated her number one in their "25 New Faces of Indie Film" in 2004.

She wrote, directed and starred in the films Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005) and The Future (2011) and wrote and directed Kajillionaire (2020).

After winning a slot in a Sundance workshop, she developed her first feature-length film, Me and You and Everyone We Know, which opened in 2005.

The film won The Caméra d'Or prize in The Cannes Festival 2005 as well as the Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, Best First Feature at the Philadelphia Film Festival, Feature Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature at the San Francisco International Film Festival, and the Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature at the Los Angeles Film Festival.

She has authored a book of short stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You (2007); a collection of nonfiction short stories, It Chooses You (2011); and the novel The First Bad Man (2015).

On May 16, 2007, July mentioned that she was currently working on a new film.

This film was originally titled "Satisfaction" but was later renamed The Future, with July in a lead role.

The film premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for a Golden Bear at the 61st Berlin International Film Festival.

In Spring 2016, July donated an archive of Joanie4Jackie to the Getty Research Institute.

In March 2018, it was announced July would write and direct a heist film, with Brad Pitt and Youree Henley producing the film, under their Plan B Entertainment and Annapurna Pictures banners, respectively.

That same month, Evan Rachel Wood, Richard Jenkins, Debra Winger and Gina Rodriguez joined the cast of the film.

In June 2018, Mark Ivanir joined the cast of the film.