Thorne Hall, Occidental College
This event is free but tickets are required.
Join us for an evening of conversation between boundary-breaking multi-hyphenate Miranda July with acclaimed interviewer and cultural interlocutor Paul Holdengräber.
Oxy Live is a series of conversations with a diverse lineup of cultural luminaries at the forefront of their fields for thought-provoking discussions hosted by acclaimed cultural interlocutor, Paul Holdengräber. All conversations are open to the public at no cost, creating a space for diverse communities to join in the conversation and explore ideas together.
The series is funded through the generous support of Occidental trustee and alumna, Lisa Coscino ’85 and the Occidental Class of '74.
Miranda July is a filmmaker, artist, and writer. Her videos, performances, and web-based projects have been presented at sites such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum and in two Whitney Biennials. July wrote, directed and starred in Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), which won a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival and four prizes at the Cannes Film Festival, including the Caméra d’or. Me and You and Everyone We Know has been released asa BluRay/DVD by the Criterion Collection. In 2011 she wrote, directed and starred in The Future. She also co-starred in Josephine Decker’s Madeline’s Madeline. In 2019 July directed the Sleater-Kinney video for ‘Hurry On Home.’ July’s feature film, Kajillionaire, produced by Plan B and Annapurna and starring Evan Rachel Wood, Richard Jenkins, Debra Winger and Gina Rodriguez was theatrically released in late 2020 to favorable reviews. In 2021 she narrated the documentary Fire of Love directed by Sara Dosa.
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 (Scribner, 2007), won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and has been published in twenty countries. She wrote a collection of essays and photographs titled It Chooses You (McSweeney’s, 2011). Her novel, The First Bad Man, became an immediate bestseller and was named one of the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2015. Her book, Miranda July (Prestel, April 14, 2020), is a complete retrospective of all her work to date and narrated by more than eighty friends and collaborators. Her new novel, All Fours (Riverhead, May 14, 2024), is a New York Times bestseller and was described as “Beyond-dazzling” in a star review from Booklist.
In 2000 July created the seminal participatory website, Learning to Love You More, with artist Harrell Fletcher, a companion book was published in 2007 (Prestel); the work is now in the collection of The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She designed Eleven Heavy Things, an interactive sculpture garden, for the 2009 Venice Biennale; it was also presented in Union Square in New York (2010) and by MOCA in Los Angeles (2011). Her email-based artwork, We Think Alone (commissioned by Magasin 3, Stockholm), launched in July 2013 with nearly 100 thousand subscribers and continued through November 2013. Other participatory art works include New Society (a performance), Somebody (a messaging app created with Miu Miu), and an interfaith charity shop in Selfridges department store in London, presented by Artangel. In late 2019 she collaborated with Margaret Qualley on a performance art piece that took place on Instagram over multiple posts. In 2020 she collaborated with Jay Benedicto to create Services a limited edition book sculpture. Her first solo museum exhibition titled Miranda July: New Society presented by Fondazione Prada is at the Milan Osservatorio March 7, 2024 – October 14, 2024. The show spans three decades of her work, from the early 1990s until the present.
Raised in Berkeley, California, July lives in Los Angeles.
Paul Holdengräber is an interviewer and curator. He was the founding executive director of Onassis Los Angeles (OLA). Previously, and for 14 years, he was founder and director of The New York Public Library’s LIVE from the NYPL cultural series where he interviewed and hosted over 600 events, holding conversations with everyone from Patti Smith to Zadie Smith, Ricky Jay to Jay-Z, Errol Morris to Jan Morris, Wes Anderson to Helen Mirren, Werner Herzog to Mike Tyson. Before his tenure at the Library, Holdengräber was the founder and director of “The Institute for Art & Cultures” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and a Fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. He has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and has taught at Princeton University, Williams College, Claremont Graduate University among others. In 2003, the French Government named Holdengräber Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, and then promoted him in 2012 to the rank of Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres. In 2010, The President of Austria awarded him the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art.
