Mira Nair

 ( American Women Film Directors ) 

Her third documentary, India Cabaret, released in 1984 portrays the exploitation of female strippers in Mumbai, and followed a customer who regularly visited a local strip club while his wife stayed at home. Nair raised roughly $130,000 for the project. The 59-minute film was shot over a span of two months. It was criticized by Nair's family. Her fourth and last documentary, made for Canadian television, explored how amniocentesis was being used to determine the sex of fetuses.

In 2001, with The Laughing Club of India, she explored Laughter yoga. Founder Dr. Madan Kararia spoke of the club's history and the growth of laughing clubs across the country, and subsequently the world. The documentary included testimonials from members of the laughter clubs who described how the practice had improved or changed their lives. Its featured segments included a group of workers in an electrical products factory in Mumbai who took time off to laugh during their coffee break.

Nair and Taraporevala next worked together on the 1991 film Mississippi Masala, which told the story of Ugandan-born Indians displaced in Mississippi. The film centers on a carpet-cleaner business owner (Denzel Washington) who falls in love with the daughter (Sarita Choudhury) of one of his Indian clients. The film revealed the prejudice in African-American and Indian communities. It was well received by critics, earned a standing ovation at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival, and won three awards at the Venice Film Festival.

Nair directed four more films before she produced Monsoon Wedding. Released in 2001, the film told the story of an Indian Punjabi people wedding, written by Sabrina Dhawan. Employing a small crew and casting some of Nair's acquaintances and relatives, the film grossed over $30 million worldwide. The film was awarded the Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival, making Nair the first female recipient of the award. Nair then directed the Golden Globe-winning Hysterical Blindness (2002), followed by making William Makepeace Thackeray's epic Vanity Fair (2004).

In 2007, Nair was asked to direct Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, but turned it down to work on The Namesake. Based on the book by Pulitzer Prize-winner Jhumpa Lahiri, Sooni Taraporevala's screenplay follows the son of Indian immigrants who wants to fit in with New York City society, but struggles to get away from his family's traditional ways. The film was presented with the Dartmouth Film Award and was also honored with the Pride of India award at the Bollywood Movie Awards. Next she directed the Amelia Earhart biopic Amelia (2009), starring Hilary Swank and Richard Gere. The film predominantly received negative reviews. " 'Amelia' Reviews, Pictures." Rotten Tomatoes, IGN Entertainment. " 'Amelia' (2009): Reviews." Metacritic. It was also a box-office bomb, grossing $19.6 million against a budget of $40 million. "Amelia." Box Office Mojo, January 10, 2010.

In 2012, Nair directed The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a thriller based on the best-selling novel by Mohsin Hamid. It received mixed reviews from critics, and was a box office bomb, earning only $2.1 million worldwide on a $15 million budget. It opened the 2012 Venice Film Festival in Venice to critical acclaim and was released worldwide in early 2013. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature questioned "how the ambivalence and provocativeness of the 'source' text translates into the film adaptation, and the extent to which the film format makes the narrative more palatable and appealing to wider audiences as compared to the novel’s target readership." Nair's 2016 film Queen of Katwe, a Walt Disney Pictures production, starred Lupita Nyong'o and David Oyelowo and was based on the story of Ugandan chess prodigy Phiona Mutesi. It had a budget of $15 million and grossed $10.4 million.

In 1998, Nair used the profits from Salaam Bombay! to create the Salaam Baalak Trust, which works with street children in India. A musical adaptation of Monsoon Wedding, directed by Nair, premiered at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, running from 5 May to 16 July 2017. ″Monsoon Wedding Kicks Off Developmental Lab Today″, Playbill, 30 May 2016 As of 2015, she lived in New York City, where she was an adjunct professor in the Film Division of the School of Arts for Columbia University in Manhattan. The university had a collaboration with Nair's Maisha Film Lab, and offered opportunities for international students to work together and share their interests in film-making.

In July 2020, journalist Ellen Barry announced that her Pulitzer Prize-nominated story "The Jungle Prince of Delhi" about the "royal family of Oudh", published in The New York Times, would be adapted into a web series for Amazon Studios by Nair. In March 2021 it was announced that Nair would direct a ten-episode TV series for Disney+ reimagining the National Treasure series with a new cast.