Mira Nair is a highly reputed India born, New York based woman film director. She was born on October 15, 1957 and the name of her production company is Mirabai Films. She was educated at the University of Delhi and Harvard University. Her debut feature film was Salaam Bombay, which won the Golden Camera award at the Cannes Film Festival and was also nominated for an Oscar. It is known, that she often works with longtime creative collaborator, screenwriter Sooni Taraporvela, whom she met at Harvard.
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. There she met her first husband Mitch Epstein, as well as Sooni Taraporvela. However, at the beginning of her career as a film artist, Nair directed four documentaries, India Cabaret, a film about the lives of strippers in a Bombay nightclub, won the award at the American Film Festival in 1986. It is to be noted, that Salaam Bombay, in the year 1988 screenplay by Sooni Taraporvela, was nominated for an Oscar in the categoy of best foreign language film, and won many other awards. It is today considered a groundbreaking film classic, and is standard fare for film students. Again, in the year 1991, her film Mississippi Masala, starred Denzel Washington and Sarita Choudhury that profiled a family of displaced Ugandan Indians living and working in Mississippi.. The screenplay was also by Sooni Taraporvela. Her latest project is Maisha, a film lab to help both the East Africans and South Asians learn to make films. Maisha is headquartered in Nair's adopted home of Kampala, Uganda. It has also been learnt that by the end of 2007, Nair will begin production on the big-budget Johny Depp starrer Shantaram in India, the U.K., and till now Australia.
