Miranda July
Who is Miranda July?
What was Miranda July’s Joanie 4 Jackie project?
How was Miranda July’s film Me and You and Everyone We Know recognized?
Miranda July (born February 15, 1974, Barre, Vermont, U.S.) is an American writer, film director, performer, and artist best known for the 2005 feature film Me and You and Everyone We Know, which she wrote, directed, and starred in, and her 2024 novel All Fours, a National Book Award nominee. July is also the author of short-story collections and the creator of stage performances, social media videos, and artworks. In 2009 she created an interactive sculpture garden titled Eleven Heavy Things for the Venice Biennale.
- Original name: Miranda Jennifer Grossinger
- Education: Attended University of California, Santa Cruz
- Notable works: Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005; film), No One Belongs Here More Than You (2007; short-story collection), The Future (2011; film), The First Bad Man (2015; novel), Kajillionaire (2020; film), and All Fours (2024; novel)
Early life and education
July is the younger of two children born to Lindy Hough and Richard Grossinger, both writers, who founded the independent nonprofit publishing house North Atlantic Books the year that July was born. She grew up in Berkeley, California, after her family relocated there in 1977. Originally named Miranda Jennifer Grossinger, she changed her last name to July, first unofficially at age 15 and then legally when she was 20. July was the name of a character created by her friend Johanna Fateman in Snarla, a feminist punk girlzine that the two women developed during the riot grrrl movement in Berkeley.
July started writing and directing plays when she was a senior in high school—her debut, The Lifers, was staged in 1992 and was based on a pen-pal relationship she had with an incarcerated person serving a life sentence for murder. July then attended the University of California, Santa Cruz, but she dropped out in her sophomore year to pursue filmmaking.
Film career
In 1995 July moved to Portland, Oregon, and worked in performance art. She founded Joanie 4 Jackie (originally named Big Miss Moviola), an all-female project that invited women and girls to submit videos. In return, participants received a “chainletter tape”—a compilation of movies made by contributors to the project, along with a zine containing the filmmakers’ biographies. Joanie 4 Jackie aimed to encourage more women to make movies and share them with each other. July transferred the project to Bard College in 2003, and the archive—an important document of the 1990s riot grrrl scene—was donated to the Getty Research Institute in 2016.
July began writing and directing her own short films in 1996. After years of struggle, she released her first full-length feature film, Me and You and Everyone We Know, to great acclaim in 2005. The film focuses on the relationship between a shoe salesman (portrayed by John Hawkes) and a struggling performance artist (July). It won the Sundance Film Festival’s Special Jury Prize for originality of vision dramatic and the Cannes film festival’s Caméra d’Or (best first film) award. American film critic Roger Ebert ranked it as one of the top five films of the decade.
July then directed The Future, which premiered at Sundance in 2011. The film features a couple (July and Hamish Linklater) whose perspectives on life change after they adopt a cat named Paw Paw. The cat narrates the film. Her third film, Kajillionaire (2020), portrays a woman (Evan Rachel Wood) and her criminal parents (Richard Jenkins and Debra Winger), who invite a stranger to a poorly planned heist.
Writing career
July’s debut short-story collection, No One Belongs Here More Than You (2007), won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and was named a top-10 book of the year by Time magazine. She next published a nonfiction interview and story collection, It Chooses You, in 2011, in collaboration with photographer Brigitte Sire.
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July’s debut novel, The First Bad Man (2015), was a New York Times bestseller. The book focuses on Cheryl Glickman, whose particular and eccentric world is upended after she takes in her boss’s aggressive adult daughter, Clee. July’s second novel, All Fours (2024), was also a New York Times bestseller, and it was additionally nominated for a National Book Award and was featured in several best books of the year lists. All Fours tells the story of an unnamed performance artist who abruptly leaves her husband and child to embark on a road trip across the United States but impulsively checks in to a motel just 30 minutes from home, starting her on a completely new and unexpected journey.
Performance art and other work
Throughout the mid- to late 1990s, July performed onstage and in music clubs, including with the band the Need. Her first full-length performance work, Love Diamond, was released in 1998. From 2002 to 2009, July, along with collaborator Harrell Fletcher, ran an online art project titled Learning to Love You More, which solicited submissions of art and memoir from readers in response to online prompts. They received over 8,000 global submissions of videos, photographs, writing, and objects. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art acquired the archive in 2010.
July has also worked as a sculptor, creating an interactive sculpture garden titled Eleven Heavy Things for the 2009 Venice Biennale. The work consisted of 11 cast fiberglass, steel-lined sculptures with such features as holes for body parts and pedestals to pose on. The sculptures were later exhibited in New York City (2010), Los Angeles (2011), and Aspen, Colorado (2015).
Fondazione Prada in Milan mounted July’s first solo museum exhibition—“Miranda July: New Society”—in 2024. The exhibition, a retrospective of July’s works beginning in the 1990s, included films, documents, costumes, and materials from her various collaborative projects.