Miranda July tells the story of her career thus far in a multimedia presentation.
SAL thanks Robin Held, Executive Director of Reel Grrls, for being the guest host at July’s presentation.
Miranda July’s career began with a play she wrote as a teenager based on her correspondence with a prison inmate; it has grown to include filmmaking, video, performance art, and visual art. July wrote, directed, and starred in her first feature-length film, Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), which won a special jury prize at Sundance and four prizes at Cannes. Her most recent film is The Future(2011), which she wrote, directed, and stars in. July’s videos, performances, and web-based projects have been presented at MOMA, the Guggenheim Museum, and in two Whitney Biennials. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Harper’s, and The New Yorker; her collection of stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You (2007), has been published in 20 countries.
Her latest book is It Chooses You (2011), of which July says “I share with you the part of my life where I was interviewing people selling things through the Pennysaver classifieds as a sort of open-ended vision quest that I secretly hoped would help me finish my screenplay (The Future) and teach me how to be a better liver of a finite life.” This interest in possessions—and those people are willing to part with—has expanded to include a performance piece called The Auction. At a recent event put on by the Center for Art of Performance at UCLA, July chose three audience members, set them on stage, asked them all manner of personal questions, and then auctioned off an item each had with them (a comb; a lip gloss). The LA Weekly’s blog calls July “an emotional surrealist whose canvas is her crowd.” Miranda July lives in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles.
