Miranda July
In conversation with Okwui Okpokwasili

For more than three decades, Miranda July has moved fluidly between film, literature, performance, participatory practice, and digital media. Her work occupies a porous space between fiction and personal experience as it unspools contemporary understandings of intimacy and relationships.

July’s humor and emotional intelligence are particularly attuned to the awkwardness, desire, loneliness, and acts of imagination that shape everyday life. From her Caméra d’Or–winning feature debut, Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), to projects such as Learning to Love You More (2000–2009), a participatory website developed with artist Harrell Fletcher that invited strangers to respond to weekly prompts, she transforms ordinary encounters into experiments in how people choose to perform themselves. Her books, including No One Belongs Here More Than You (2007), It Chooses You (2011), and The First Bad Man (2015), follow eccentric protagonists whose fantasies and obsessions expose the fragile social scripts underlying contemporary experiences.

Most recently, July’s bestselling novel All Fours (Riverhead, 2024) has emerged as a major cultural phenomenon, catalyzing widespread conversations around aging, desire, domesticity, and reinvention. The novel follows an unnamed artist who abandons a cross-country road trip to stay in a local motel. The distance from her house and family, however small, cracks open a door for new ways of seeing herself and the world she has built. The protagonist’s emotional and physical wanderings open space for longing, fantasy, and continual self-reinvention otherwise missing from the landscape of her life.

Okwui Okpokwasili is a Brooklyn-based performer, choreographer, and writer creating multidisciplinary performance pieces. Her highly experimental productions include Bessie Award-winning pent-up: a revenge dance and Bronx Gothic, as well as poor people’s TV room, poor people’s TV room (SOLO), when I return who will receive me, Adaku’s revolt, and the participatory performance installation Sitting on a Man’s Head. 

The Bluhm-Kaul Keynotes are made possible through a major gift from Barbara Bluhm-Kaul and Don Kaul.

The Aspen Institute campus includes multiple venues with varying accessibility features. Shuttle service will operate continuously from the Aspen Art Museum from 1PM to 2PM. If you require accessibility accommodations, including wheelchair access or assistance, please contact us at air@aspenartmuseum.org at least 48 hours in advance so we can evaluate and coordinate reasonable accommodations .