And, for the first time since she performed on the Loeb mainstage, Nair is returning to her theater roots. She plans to take Monsoon Wedding to Broadway, producing and directing the stage version.

Although it has not yet been formally announced, she says she will also dramatize The Namesake: A Novel, by Jhumpa Lahiri. She also plans to do Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul for HBO, and Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist.

Nair has also recently received the go-ahead and secured much of the funding for a long standing dream of hers: establishing a nonprofit East African film laboratory called Maisha to be launched in July 2005. The project will bring together 12 young film makers—four of them South Asian, four East African students and four from the Asian and African diaspora—with established mentors to learn script writing and direction.

“It’s really great because in the entire continent of Africa there is nowhere a young person can dream of making images of his or her reality,” she says.

In addition, just a few months ago Nair founded a new production company in addition to Mirabai Films, which she started in 1989. Called the International Bhenji Brigade—which means ‘uncool sister’ in Hindi—this production company aims to discover and produce the films of South Asian talent.

While working on these various projects, Nair divides her time primarily between New York, where her son Zohran attends school and her husband Mahmood Mamdani is a government professor at Columbia University, and her home in Kampala, Uganda, where Nair is an avid gardener. Her family also spends time in a home in New Delhi.

—Staff writer Ella A. Hoffman can be reached at ehoffman@fas.harvard.edu