Miranda July (born Miranda Jennifer Grossinger on February 15, 1974) is an American artist, filmmaker, writer, performer, and actor whose work moves between cinema, fiction, video, performance, digital media, and participatory art. Raised in Berkeley, California, she developed an early connection to the do-it-yourself culture of the Pacific Northwest and began making independent performances, films, publications, and collaborative projects outside conventional artistic institutions. Her work is often marked by awkward humor, emotional directness, unusual forms of audience participation, and a sustained interest in intimacy, isolation, desire, and the possibility of connection.
In the mid-1990s, July founded Big Miss Moviola, later known as Joanie 4 Jackie, a mail-art and film-exchange project that circulated short movies made by women. The project created an informal network for filmmakers working beyond the commercial film industry and reflected July's interest in art as a social activity rather than a one-way presentation. She also began developing solo performances, including Love Diamond and The Swan Tool, works that combined monologue, character, props, sound, and deliberately unstable theatrical situations.
July reached a broader audience with her first feature film, Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005). She wrote, directed, and starred in the film as a lonely artist and caregiver whose life becomes entangled with a family living in her neighborhood. The film's mixture of tenderness, absurdity, and discomfort earned major recognition, including the Camera d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and a Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. Its success established July as a distinctive voice in American independent cinema, although her practice continued to extend well beyond filmmaking.
Her collaborative internet project Learning to Love You More, created with artist Harrell Fletcher, invited the public to complete a series of assignments and submit the results for display online. The project turned ordinary experiences into shared acts of observation and participation, and it was later acquired by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Other major art projects include the sculpture garden Eleven Heavy Things, the performance New Society, the messaging app Somebody, and F.A.M.I.L.Y. (Falling Apart Meanwhile I Love You), a participatory video work.
As a writer, July published the short-story collection No One Belongs Here More Than You in 2007. The book's characters often struggle to communicate while using fantasy, embarrassment, and private rituals to navigate everyday life. It won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. She followed it with It Chooses You (2011), a hybrid work combining writing, photography, and encounters with people selling unusual objects through classified advertisements. Her first novel, The First Bad Man (2015), explored obsession, caregiving, sexuality, and self-invention through a highly idiosyncratic narrative voice.
July returned to feature filmmaking with The Future (2011), a formally adventurous drama about a couple confronting stalled lives and the pressure of imagined possibilities. She later wrote and directed Kajillionaire (2020), a crime comedy about a family of small-time con artists whose emotional defenses are disrupted by an outsider. In 2024, July published All Fours, a novel about artistic identity, marriage, desire, and radical personal change. The book became a New York Times bestseller and was a finalist for several major literary prizes. Across her career, July has maintained a cross-disciplinary practice in which films, books, performances, and digital works continually question the boundaries between private feeling and public art.