Mira Nair

Nair founded Maisha Film Lab after shooting her second feature film, Mississippi Masala in Kampala, Uganda. ⁶ Nair is a film writer, director and producer of films. Her debut film, Hello Bombay!, won the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1988. Nair’s 2016 Queen of Katwe was also nominated for an Oscar for best foreign-language film. ⁷ She is the director of The Perez Family (1995), Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love (1996), Monsoon Wedding (2001), Hysterical Blindness (2002), Vanity Fair (2004), The Namesake (2006), Amelia (2009), and The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2012). Nair is also a former Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellow and was awarded India’s second-highest civilian honor, the Padma Bhushan, in 2012. ^{2  2}

Affiliated Organizations

Maisha Film Lab

Maisha Film Lab is a Uganda-based non-profit organization that provides training and support for emerging East African filmmakers. ⁸ The group was founded in 2004 by Mira Nair and provides filmmaking scholarships to its trainees across its film labs in Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, and Tanzania. ^{6  6  9} Maisha partners with the Doha Tribeca Film Festival, the Rwanda Film Festival, the Bayimba International Festival of the Arts, the Kenya International Film Festival, and the Zanzibar International Film Festival to publish and disseminate its films. ¹⁰

Doha Film Institute (DFI)

Mira Nair has received funding from and collaborated with the Doha Film Institute (DFI). From 2010 to 2014, the Doha Film Institute (DFI) underwrote a training camp for Qatari students in screenwriting and filmmaking at Nair’s Maisha Film Labs in East Africa and in Doha. DFI also paid the $15 million budget of Nair’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a 2012 film which a 2025 New York Post report claimed previously struggled to obtain financing. ³

Agence Publics Qatar (APQ)

In 2022 and 2023, Mira Nair received $102,000 in business from Agence Publics Qatar, a Qatari event planning company. ³

Controversy

Alleged funding from Qatar

In August 2025, the New York Post published a report alleging that since 2009, Mira Nair had received funding towards her filmmaking from Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad Al-Thani, the sister to Qatar’s ruling emir, as well as the state-funded cultural institutions she controlled. The report alleged that this helped fund film training course for Qatari students in screenwriting and filmmaking at Nair’s Maisha Film Labs in East Africa and in Doha, Qatar. Al-Thani also personally invited Nair to participate in the cultural program the country organized as part of the festivities around hosting the 2022 FIFA World Cup. ³

The report also claimed that in 2022 and 2023, Qatari event management and planning company Agence Publics Qatar (APQ) had donated $102,000 towards a company Nair founded in her native India. It also alleged that APQ shares its chairman with the Qatar Engineering and Construction Company, a central company in Qatar’s oil and gas industry.  ³

Views on Israel

In 2013, Mira Nair claimed she refused to travel to Israel for the Haifa International Film Festival, alleging she would only visit the country “when the walls come down” and the “occupation is gone.” She further claimed, “I will go to Israel when the state does not privilege one religion over another. I will go to Israel when apartheid is over.” ¹¹

Nair has also expressed support for the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement to delegitimize the state of Israel as well as the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. ⁵

Zohran Mamdani

Mira Nair is the mother of New York City Democratic Party and socialist politician Zohran Mamdani, who was elected to the office of Mayor of New York City in November 2025. ¹²