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.

Quick Facts Born, Occupations ...

Miranda July
July at 2024 National Book Awards finalist reading
Born	Miranda Jennifer Grossinger (1974-02-15) February 15, 1974 (age 50) Barre, Vermont, US
Occupations	Actress filmmaker author
Spouse	Mike Mills ​ ​ (m. 2009; sep. 2022)​
Children	1
Parents	Richard Grossinger (father) Lindy Hough (mother)
Relatives	Skylar Brandt (cousin)

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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). 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 novels The First Bad Man (2015) and All Fours (2024).

July was born in Barre, Vermont, in 1974,^[1] the daughter of Lindy Hough and Richard Grossinger. Her parents are both writers who taught at Goddard College at the time.^[2] They were also the founders of North Atlantic Books, a publisher of alternative health, martial arts, and spiritual titles.^[3][4] Her father was Jewish, and her mother was Protestant.^[5]

July was encouraged to work on her short fiction by author Rick Moody.^[6] She was raised in Berkeley, California, where she first began staging plays at 924 Gilman Street,^[7][5] a local punk rock club.^[8][9] She attended The College Preparatory School in Oakland for high school.^[3] She describes the experience as overwhelming.^[5] She later attended the film school at University of California Santa Cruz, but dropped out during her second year and moved to Portland, Oregon.^[8][10]

After relocating to Portland, Oregon,^[11] she took up performance art in "one woman shows".^[12] Her performances were successful; she has been quoted as saying she has not worked a day job since she was 23 years old.^[13] In an interview for the Tate, she explained that she still tried to practice performance, partially due to its stark differences from filmmaking, such as its live audience or how "present" it is in comparison.^[14] Portland is also where she began participating in the riot grrrl scene that was beginning to grow in the early 1990s.^[5]

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.^[5] 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.^[15][8]

At the young age of 16, Miranda wrote and directed a play known as The Lifers, which was based on a close connection she had with a man who was incarcerated for murder. She moved on to stage it in punk clubs.

She recorded her first E.P. for Kill Rock Stars in 1996, titled Margie Ruskie Stops Time, with music by The Need.^[44] She released two full-length LPs, 10 Million Hours A Mile in 1997 and The Binet-Simon Test in 1998, both on Kill Rock Stars.^[45] She collaborated with Calvin Johnson in his musical project Dub Narcotic Sound System,^[44] and in 1999 she made a split EP with IQU, released on Johnson's K Records.^[46]

July has acted in many of her own short films, including Atlanta, The Amateurist, Nest of Tens, Are You The Favorite Person of Anyone?, and her feature-length films Me and You and Everyone We Know and The Future. She also made an appearance in the film Jesus' Son (1998).^[41] She appeared in an episode of Portlandia in 2012.^[47] She co-starred in Josephine Decker's 2018 feature film, Madeline's Madeline.^[48]

In 1998, July made Love Diamond, her first full-length multimedia performance piece – in her description, a "live movie."^[44] This two-hour stage work featured July playing multiple characters, humorously depicting women's perceived cultural roles.^[49] This was followed by a second full-length performance piece, The Swan Tool, and a six-minute film, Getting Stronger Every Day (2001).^[50] The latter is an abstract view of a grown man and a little girl, seemingly taunted by indistinct floating shapes while an offscreen narrator recounts a tale of real-life pedophilia.^[50] The Swan Tool is another "live movie", a one-woman show in which July plays Lisa Cobb, a woman searching for her lost body. Although it's peppered with deadpan comedy, the surrealist story concerns "childhood sexual traumas, adult alienation, and persistent, unfocused guilt".^[51]

In 2006, after completing her first feature film, she went on to create another multimedia piece, Things We Don't Understand and Definitely Are Not Going To Talk About, which she performed in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York.^[52] This stage show contained several ideas that would become key elements of her later film, The Future.^[44]

In March 2015, July premiered her performance work New Society as part of the 58th San Francisco International Film Festival.^[53] In the program for the performance, July requested the audience not share details of the show, stating it is now "a rare sensation to sit down in a theater with no idea what will happen."^[54]

With artist Harrell Fletcher, July founded the online art project called Learning to Love You More (2002–2009). The project's website offered assignments to artists whose submissions became part of "an ever-changing series of exhibitions, screenings and radio broadcasts presented all over the world".^[55] Over 8,000 people participated in the project.^[5] In addition to its internet presentations, Learning to Love You More also compiled exhibitions for the Whitney Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, and other hosts.^[55][56] A book version of the project's online art was released in 2007.^[56][57] Starting May 1, 2009 the project's website stopped accepting assignment submissions. In 2010 the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art acquired the website, to preserve it as an archive of the project online.^[58]

July constructed a sculptural exhibition, Eleven Heavy Things, for the 2009 Venice Biennale.^[59] Its assortment of cartoonish shapes, made sturdy with fiberglass and steel, were designed for playful interaction by visitors.^[60] The exhibition was also shown in New York City at Union Square Park and in Los Angeles at the MOCA Pacific Design Center.^[59]

In 2013 she organized We Think Alone, an art project involving the private emails of public figures. Unredacted except for the recipients' names, the emails were freely donated by a disparate group of notable persons including author Sheila Heti, theoretical physicist Lee Smolin, basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and actress Kirsten Dunst. July grouped selected emails by topic, and sent a new set to the project's subscribers every week for 20 weeks.^[61][62] As one reviewer described them, the emails are "simultaneously mundane and eerily revealing; they shed light on how people in the public eye craft their private identities... [they] also underscore, in some way, the way all of us present ourselves over email: excessively formal or passive-aggressive, lovey-dovey, flakey, overly excited."^[62]

In 2014, July created Somebody, an iOS app^[63] which allows users to compose a message to be delivered to someone else in-person, or to deliver someone else's message in-person. When you send your friend a message through Somebody, it goes – not to your friend – but to the Somebody user nearest your friend. This person (likely a stranger) delivers the message verbally, acting as your stand-in. Somebody is a far-reaching public art project that incites performance and twists our love of avatars and outsourcing – every relationship becomes a three-way. The project was funded by Miu Miu.^[64] The app closed on October 31, 2015.^[65]

In 2022 July collaborated with Mack Books to create Services, a limited edition book/sculpture composed of photographs and texts between July and Jay Benedicto, a trans woman living in the Philippines who offered services to increase the readership of self-published authors. The first six months of July and Benedicto's correspondence, which coincided with the first six months of North American lockdowns in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, were published in the book. Only 25 copies were made available for sale.^[66]

For its fall 2024 campaign, Prada worked with July on "Now That We're Here", a photo series featuring stars like Hunter Schafer, Letitia Wright, Damson Idris, Harris Dickinson and Ma Yili who encourage people to call into a hotline where they can interact with pre-recorded scripts recorded by July herself.^[67]

Her short story The Boy from Lam Kien was published in 2005 by Cloverfield Press, as a special-edition book with illustration by Elinor Nissley and Emma Hedditch. Another short story, Something That Needs Nothing, was published in the following year by The New Yorker.^[68]

July was heavily inspired by the riot grrrl movement. She was friends with several of the bands who were part of the movement such as Bikini Kill, Excuse 17, and Heavens to Betsy.^[15][11]

Her films have a common theme of "intimacy." For example, many of her work's titles use pronouns ("me," "you," "we," etc.). July creates "slice of life" films using ordinary characters and giving them attention within her films. She describes this as her being, "desperate to bring people together."^[5] However, as she's aged she's become more interested in how people sabotage coming together.^[14]

July receives criticism for being too "niche" or trying too hard to seem "quirky." According to The New York Times, "July has come to personify everything infuriating about the Etsy-shopping, Wes Anderson-quoting, McSweeney's-reading, coastal-living category of upscale urban bohemia that flourished in the aughts [sic]." She is often lumped in with directors like Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach, but says she gets more push-back than them due to her films being so emotional and feminine, being called "precious" and "twee." In this same interview with The New York Times, July explains that she likes the directors she's been compared to, but they never get criticized for making films about themselves, though she as a female filmmaker is often labeled "self-obsessed."^[5] In a 2015 Guardian article, July adds, "Yes, it's pretty clear that 'whimsical' is a diminishing word, [...] I almost think asking the question is like I'm being asked to gossip about myself. I think it's kind of a female thing, being asked to gossip about yourself. I think I'm maybe done with that."^[84]

July also often includes the theme of sex in her films. The New York Times describes this theme "as both a sudden surprise and a way to illuminate the inner lives of her characters". July elaborates: "I was always interested in sex, even as a kid. Sex includes shame and humiliation and fantasies and longing. It's so dense with the kinds of things I'm interested in."^[5]

She has also expressed her interest in the rhythm and feeling of film, rather than being "inspired" by other filmmakers, and states that she wouldn't call herself a "cinephile."^[5]

In between Me and You and Everyone We Know and The Future, July began to incorporate some of the oddball avant-garde things she had done in theater performance into her films, some of which was easier to swallow on stage but not on screen, such as the talking cat in The Future,^[14] which she was later criticized for by viewers.

July also has a strong interest in clothing and costume.^[12] She served as the lookbook creative director for Uniqlo UT's 2019 clothing line.^[85]

July is married to filmmaker and visual artist Mike Mills, with whom she has a child,^[86] born in March 2012.^[87][88] July and Mills met at both of their first Sundance Festival premieres in 2005,^[89] and married in mid-2009.^[5] In July 2022, July announced that she and Mills were separated romantically, although they continue to live together and co-parent.

In a 2007 interview with Bust magazine, July spoke of the importance which feminism has had in her life, saying, "What's confusing about [being a feminist]? It's just being pro your ability to do what you need to do. It doesn't mean you don't love your boyfriend or whatever ... When I say 'feminist', I mean that in the most complex, interesting, exciting way!"^[90] In a later interview in 2017 on Idaho's Public Television station, July explained that once she started confronting the racial issues in current day politics, she started contacting publishers and revising her work, realizing that not everything she had said was racially and politically sound.^[12]

She changed her last name to "July" when she was 15, after a character (based on her) in a story by her high school best friend, Johanna Fateman. She changed her name legally in her early 20s.^[5] July describes her family as very "DIY", which probably accounts for some of July's makeshift style.^[5] Therefore, when July wanted to change her last name, her father was very accepting of the decision.^[12] Her father was a workaholic, which is something she believes she picked up from him.^[12] Her family also dabbled in practicing New Age religions and discussed spirituality while she was growing up.^[5]

• Love Diamond (1998–2000)^[9]
• The Swan Tool (2000–2002)
• How I Learned to Draw (2002–2003)
• Things We Don't Understand and Are Definitely Not Going to Talk About (2006–2008)
• New Society (2015)

• 1998: Andrea Frank Foundation Grant, given to nine American artists each year.^[9]
• 2002: Creative Capital Emerging Fields Award^[101]
• 2006: You, Me, and Everyone We Know received the Camera d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and a Special Jury Prize at Sundance.^[102]
• 2007: No One Belongs Here More Than You won the Frank O'Connor award.^[84]
• 2016: July was one of 683 artists and executives invited to join the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences as a writer.^[103]
• 2023: Peabody Award for her job as a narrator on the hit documentary Fire of Love.

• "Miranda July Called Before Congress To Explain Exactly What Her Whole Thing Is". The Onion. January 21, 2012. Retrieved January 26, 2012. (Satirical piece)

• List of female film and television directors