Event
Seeing India Through My Lens: East West and Coming Full Circle featuring Mira Nair
3260 South Street, Philadelphia
Join the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI) for the Fall 2023 CASI Saluja Global Fellow Lecture featuring Academy-Award nominated film director Mira Nair.
About the Speaker
“If we don’t tell our own stories, no one else will.”
Mira Nair is best known for her visually dense films that pulsate with life. Her debut feature, Salaam Bombay! (1988) won the Caméra d’Or at Cannes, followed by the groundbreaking Mississippi Masala (1991), the Golden Globe & Emmy-winning Hysterical Blindness (2001) and the international hit Monsoon Wedding (2001), for which she was the first woman to win Venice Film Festival’s coveted Golden Lion.
Also known for her literary craftsmanship of subcontinental fiction, Mira has filmed The Namesake (2006), The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2012), Vanity Fair (2004), A Suitable Boy (2020) and Queen of Katwe (2016). In 2020, Nair directed an adaptation of Vikram Seth’s epic tale, A Suitable Boy, for BBC/Netflix, a sprawling tale of identity and love in a newly independent India. She recently directed the TV pilot of the iconic film National Treasure. Her next film will be AMRI, an experimental portrait of Amrita Sher-Gil.
She returned to the theatre for her most recent endeavor, directing Monsoon Wedding the Musical, which opened in New York City at St Ann's Warehouse in May 2023 and is bound for Broadway.
An activist by nature, Nair founded Salaam Baalak Trust for street children in 1989, and the Maisha Film Lab in East Africa to train film makers on the continent in 2004. In 2012, she was awarded the Padma Bhushan, India’s third-highest civilian honor.
Photo credit: Nina Subin (@ninasubin on Instagram)
Co-sponsored by Penn's Department of Cinema and Media Studies, the Department of South Asia Studies, and the South Asia Center.
The Saluja Global Fellows Program has been made possible by the generous gift from Vishal Saluja ENG’89 W’89. The program enables CASI to invite eminent leaders and rising experts on contemporary India preferably from the fields of media, culture, law, and contemporary history to be in residence for one to two weeks at CASI.