Miranda July (born February 15, 1974) is a performance artist, musician, writer, actress and film director. She currently resides in Los Angeles, California, after having lived for many years in Portland, Oregon. Born Miranda Jennifer Grossinger, she works under the surname of "July," which can be traced to a character from a "girlzine" Miranda created with a high school friend called "Snarla."Miranda July was born in Barre, Vermont, the daughter of Lindy Hough and Richard Grossinger. Her parents, who taught at Goddard College at the time, are both writers. In 1974 they founded North Atlantic Books, a publisher of alternative health, martial arts, and spiritual titles. Miranda was encouraged to work on her short fiction by author and friend of a friend, Rick Moody.Miranda grew up in Berkeley, California, where she first began writing plays and staging them at the all-ages club 924 Gilman. She later attended UC Santa Cruz, dropping out in her sophomore year. After leaving college, she moved to Portland, Oregon and took up performance art. Her performances were successful; she has been quoted as saying she has not worked a day job since she was 23 years old.FilmmakingFilmmaker Magazine rated her number one in their "25 New Faces of Indie Film" in 2004. 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.Beginning in 1996, while residing in Portland, July began a project called Joanie4Jackie (originally called "Big Miss Moviola") which solicited short films by women, which she compiled onto video cassettes, using the theme of a chain letter. She then sent the cassette to the participants, and to subscribers to the series, and offered them for sale to others interested. In addition to the chain letter series, July began a second series called the Co-Star Series, in which she invited friends from larger cities to select a group of films outside of the chain letter submissions. The curators included Miranda July, Rita Gonzalez, and Astria Suparak. The Joanie4Jackie series also screened at film festivals and DIY movie events. So far, thirteen editions have been released, the latest in 2002.At her speaking engagement at the Modern Times Bookstore in San Francisco's Mission District on May 16, 2007, July mentioned that she is currently working on a new film.MusicShe recorded her first EP for Kill Rock Stars in 1996, entitled Margie Ruskie Stops Time, with music by The Need. After that, she released two more full-length LPs, 10 Million Hours A Mile in 1997 and Binet-Simon Test in 1998, both released on Kill Rock Stars. In 1999 she made a split EP with IQU, released on K Records.Screen WriterMiranda co-wrote the Wayne Wang feaure length film "The Center of the World." MultimediaIn 1998, July made her first full-length multimedia performance piece, Love Diamond, in collaboration with composer Zac Love and with help from artist Jamie Isenstein; she called it a "live movie." She performed it at venues around the country, including the New York Video Festival, The Kitchen, and Yo-yo a Go-go in Olympia. She created her next major full-length performance piece, The Swan Tool, in 2000, also in collaboration with Love, with digital production work by Mitsu Hadeishi. She performed this piece in venues around the world, including the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.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.Her short story The Boy from Lam Kien was published in 2005 by Cloverfield Press, as a special-edition book.
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 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 debuted at Utahs Sundance festival, which was the year his Thumbsucker premiered there. Four years later, in the summer of 2009, they married at Millss 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 Irelands Cork City-Frank OConnor 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.
Gave birth to her first child, a boy named Hopper, in February 2012.
Member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences since 2016.
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.
[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.
Self-inventing, daring, and my wife would be Iman.
Inelegantly, and without my consent, time passed.
. . . we had once called out hello into the cauldron of the world and then run away before anyone could respond.
Sometimes I lie in bed trying to decide which of my friends I truly care about, and I always come to the same conclusion: none of them.
We come from long lines of people destined never to meet.
In the recurring dream everything has already fallen down, and I’m underneath. I’m crawling, sometimes for days, under the rubble. And as I crawl I realize that this one was the Big One. It was the earthquake that shook the whole world, and every single thing was destroyed. But this isn’t the scary part. That part always comes right before I wake up. I am crawling and then suddenly I remember: the earthquake happened years ago. This pain, this dying, this is just normal. This is how life is. In fact, I realize, there never was an earthquake. Life is just this way, broken, and I am crazy for dreaming something else.
She looked utterly betrayed, as betrayed as the most betrayed person in Shakespeare.
This person has hoped and dreamed and now it is really happening and this person can hardly believe it. But believing is not an issue here, the time for faith and fantasy is over, it is really really happening. It involves stepping forward and bowing. Possibly there is some kneeling, such as when one is knighted. One is almost never knighted. But this person may kneel and receive a tap on each shoulder with a sword. Or, more likely, this person will be in a car or a store or under a vinyl canopy when it happens. Or online or on the phone. It could be an e-mail re: your knighthood. Or a long, laughing, rambling phone message in which every person this person has ever known is talking on a speakerphone and they are all saying, You have passed the test, it was all just a test, we were only kidding, real life is so much better than that.
I wondered how many other things had flown past me into death. Perhaps many. Perhaps I was flying past them, like the grim reaper, signaling the end. This would explain so much.
And it struck me that maybe True magazine had been wrong. Maybe there are no New Men. Maybe there are only the living and the dead, and all those who are living deserve each other and are equal to each other.
Are you angry? Punch a pillow. Was it satisfying? Not hardly. These days people are too angry for punching. What you might try is stabbing. Take an old pillow and lay it on the front lawn. Stab it with a big pointy knife. Again and again and again. Stab hard enough for the point of the knife to go into the ground. Stab until the pillow is gone and you are just stabbing the earth again and again, as if you want to kill it for continuing to spin, as if you are getting revenge for having to live on this planet day after day, alone.
For a split second I felt as though she was nobody special in the larger scheme of my life. She was just some girl who had tied me to her leg to help her sink when she jumped off the bridge. Then I blinked and was in love with her again.
This person realizes that staying home means blowing off everyone this person has ever known. But the desire to stay in is very strong. This person wants to run a bath and then read in bed.
I felt like I wasn’t living thoroughly enough — I was distracted in ways I wouldn’t be if I’d been born in 1929.
Why do you think we are the only animal that kisses? She was near again. Because the area in front of our faces is our most intimate zone. She drew a breath. This is why humans are the only romantic animal!,If I could quietly kill her without anyone knowing, I would.
The boy was growing bored and this was a form of growing up.
We still kissed frequently, usually a cluster of small pecks. An acronym for our early deep kisses. Which in a way was more intimate because only we knew what it stood for.
