Miranda July on Strangers

You can tell a lot about someone you don’t know from the contents of their wallet. There's also a lot that you can’t tell.

This will not be a normal Sunday Sermon. But then Miranda July isn’t generally known for being normal. She’ll be speaking on the subject of Strangers. Not that strangely, given the topic, you’ll also have the chance to get to know more about some of the other people who are attending.

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 her first feature-length film, 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 Camera d’Or.

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. July created the participatory website, learningtoloveyoumore, with artist Harrell Fletcher and a companion book was published in 2007 (Prestel); the work is now in collection of The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.