If Mira Nair ’79 were a yoga pose, she would be the headstand, or sirshana.

“It forces you to look at life upside down,” she says. “It teaches you balance and how to see your world differently.”

Standing on your head isn’t easy—but then, it’s not the straightforward that Nair is after.

In 1976, the young woman who was to become one of India’s most acclaimed modern filmmakers left her home in Delhi for the first time. The plane took her across the world to Cambridge, Mass.

She’d seen Harvard’s red bricks and white trim only in the film Love Story—but her top choice, Wellesley College, wouldn’t give her credit for her studies at Delhi University, and Yale had lost her application altogether. So she came to Harvard along with a passion for theater, a wide smile and an open mind.

“I was less culture shocked than many of my classmates,” she says. “I didn’t grow up with this big mantle over my head about Harvard. I didn’t have any great expectations. I came here with a fairly blank slate.”

A couple of decades, several award-winning films, an Oscar nomination and a family later, Nair will return to her alma mater this weekend to receive the 9th annual Harvard Arts Medal. She will host a screening of her signature film Monsoon Wedding at the Harvard Film Archive and discuss her work in Sanders Theater with Third Rock from the Sun’s John Lithgow ’67.

“It’s a little weird because Sanders is where I took exams. To speak there is a bit much,” Nair says. “But it’s pretty awesome—in the literal sense of awe, not the slang word.”

Nair’s ability to pack every frame with eye-candy has garnered her worldwide attention. Documentaries So Far From India and India Cabaret won international awards, and her first feature film Salaam Bombay! was nominated for an Oscar. Mississippi Masala, starring Denzel Washington, won three awards at the Venice Film Festival. Monsoon Wedding was showered with critical acclaim, while her more daring Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love and The Perez Family sparked controversy.

It’s an impressive catalog of accomplishment behind the camera for a woman who originally thought she’d be front-and-center on stage.

An active participant in Calcutta’s political street theater scene, the girl who came to Harvard had long aspired to a career in the spotlight.

“I was passionately involved in drama,” Nair says. “But in college I found only musicals.”

Nair took to the stage several times at the beginning of her Harvard career, starring in a South American version of Sophocles’ Antigone. In her first semester she won the Boylston Prize for her delivery of one of Jocasta’s speeches from Oedipus Rex.

“I performed for a year, but generally the inspiration wasn’t there,” she says.

She says she found it in a musty Sever Hall basement.