Miranda July (born February 15, 1974) is a performing artist, writer, actress and film director. Born Miranda Jennifer Grossinger,she works under the surname of “July,” which can be traced to a character from a “girlzine” Miranda created with high school friend Johanna Fateman, called Snarla.
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 Anderson, Paul Thomas Solondz, Todd, Green, David Gordon, Campion, Jane, Arnold, Andrea and Jonze, Spike.
Dropped out of college and left California in her early 20s to live in Portland, Oregon, where she later played in a band called Kill Rock Stars.
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.
