Biography for
Miranda July More at IMDbPro »

Date of Birth

15 February 1974, Barre, Vermont, USA

Birth Name

Miranda Jennifer Grossinger

Mini Biography

Filmmaker Magazine rated her #1 in their "25 New Faces of Indie Film" in 2004!

She is a performance artist and published short story writer. Since becoming a filmmaker, her debut feature, Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005) has won several film awards.

Daughter of Lindy Hough and Richard Grossinger, writers and publishers who founded North Atlantic Books.

IMDb Mini Biography By: IMDB

Spouse

Mike Mills

(2009 - present)

Trivia

Filmmaker Magazine rated her #1 in their "25 New Faces of Indie Film" in 2004!

She is a performance artist and published short story writer. Since becoming a filmmaker, her debut feature Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005) has won several film awards.

Daughter of Lindy Hough and Richard Grossinger, writers and publishers who founded North Atlantic Books.

According to the writer/director in high school Miranda and her best friend worked on a fanzine named "Snarla." The two main characters of the 'zine were Ida and July; Miranda was July. Miranda was also creating her first plays and she announced one as "A New Play by Miranda July," the first time she used the pseudonym. It stuck.

Met husband Mike Mills in 2005 at party after her film Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005) debuted at Utah's Sundance festival, which was the year his Thumbsucker (2005) premiered there. Four years later, in the summer of 2009, they married at Mills's house in the hills of Nevada.

Lives in L.A.'s Silver Lake neighborhood.

Lived a very bohemian kind of life, growing up between ages 7 and 14 in an Arts and Crafts-style house on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, California.

Says she has been strongly influenced by the work of directors Paul Thomas Anderson, Todd Solondz, David Gordon Green, Jane Campion, Andrea Arnold, and Spike Jonze.

Dropped out of college and left California in her early 20s to live in Portland, Oregon, where she later released spoken word albums on the Kill Rock Stars label.

In prep school, Miranda corresponded with an imprisoned murderer. She wrote a play about her experience called "The Lifers" and, at age 16, she staged it at a local punk club.

Her father Richard grew up in Manhattan, near Central Park, with the surname Towers. He later took the name Grossinger after he was told his birth father was a member of the family that owned the famous Catskills mountain resort of same name. Eventually, however, he learned his real birth father was someone else.

Her short story collection, "No One Belongs Here More Than You," won Ireland's Cork City-Frank O'Connor award in 2007, along with a 35,000 Euro first prize.

When living in Portland, she worked as a tastemaker for a local ad agency, during which time she suggested the name "Coke II" for a new beverage. Much later, Coca-Cola rewarded her idea with a check for $25,000, which Miranda says arrived in the mail as a complete surprise.

She co-produced a 7-year Internet project called "Learning to Love You More" with cinematographer Harrell Fletcher, in which over 8,000 people responded to online assignments such as "Take a picture of your parents kissing." The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art recently acquired the work.

Personal Quotes

When I was very little, I probably wanted to be more normal. I probably wanted the Laura Ashley bedroom, and instead I got thrift-store everything.

(About losing her virginity:) I was 16. He was a 27-year-old grad student at Berkeley. 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.

I'm not a cinephile. My films don't reference films. I'm more interested in rhythm and feeling.

(on certain male directors) They become kind of brands. It's much harder to do that if you're a woman. That's crucial for longevity...All those men are also personal. I don't mind that, but I do mind that it's not really questioned, whereas I or another woman is looked at as so self-obsessed. Men are just not being judged in the same way. They're never going to be annoying in the same way.

(On her parents' differing religious backgrounds) There was no one specific belief but a kind of looser spiritual believing in just about everything. I think there's something spiritual in a very day-to-day, mundane existence. It's impossible to articulate, and it's happening now, almost like a perverse secret. . . That's always sort of fascinating to me.

I feel very blessed that I can be good to myself in that delicate, creative way. It's good to nurture yourself, and it's good for the work, because it's always got room to grow.

[regarding Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005)] When I was going through my first movie, I was going through a really bad breakup. It was rough on me. But I was in this state where everything was kind of science-fictional. My whole world was upside down. It felt like a murder had taken place. I was alive. And he was alive. But it felt like something had been murdered.