She places her phone on the tripod, presses record and steps back. Standing between the camera and a large mirror, she enjoys watching the doubling effect it creates. She starts to spin, her arms lifted, improvising the movement as she goes.
For Miranda July, what matters is discovering what she doesn’t know. She moves back and stumbles, finding awe in the process of creating something she hasn’t planned. She dances every day, often on Instagram, trying different outfits and unusual angles. It’s never the same.
On Sept. 24, July will be a guest at Hancher Auditorium in Iowa City as part of Infinite Dream, a multidisciplinary arts festival exploring the shape, depth and complexity of the American story. She will speak with Melissa Febos, a renowned essayist and professor in the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program. July is a Guggenheim Fellow and one of Time’s “100 most influential people of 2025.” Her latest novel, All Fours, was a finalist for the National Book Award.
I’d read July’s collection No One Belongs Here More Than You, and watched her film Me and You and Everyone We Know, but it wasn’t until 2012, when I listened to David Sedaris read her story Roy Spivey on The New Yorker Fiction Podcast that I realized the magnitude of her wistful quirkiness.
The narrator bonds with a famous person on a plane and thinks they might see each other again. She conveys a twisted fascination I’d never seen before: “I asked myself if I would kill my parents to save his life, a question I had been posing since I was 15. The answer always used to be yes. But in time all those boys had faded away and my parents were still there… In this case, however, I had to say yes. Yes, I would.”
On a rainy August morning, I spoke with July about All Fours, AI, sex, porn, climate change and more.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
In 2024 you had your first ever solo gallery show at the Fondazione Prada in Milan. What was it like to see 30 years of your work?
Each thing you make is so urgent and present in the moment and you never imagine looking back at all those things together. It was a little sobering to see just the sheer amount of labor and relentlessness and, not desperation, but certainly seeing that this young woman was hellbent on creating performance art. There was something about it that it did almost slightly disturb me.
I was proud, but I also thought, I’m in the middle of my life now; what do I want it to look like for the second half? And nothing I had done appealed to me, which I think is appropriate. You don’t want to keep repeating, but that was sort of unexpected. There was a kind of eye-opening sobering quality to it for me that hopefully no one else had. Hopefully everyone else was enjoying it just as art.
In 2014, you conceived an app that made users interact with strangers. What made you think of it?
I’m occasionally just wrestling with a new technology, which is always changing. At one point the new technology was websites, but around the time of this project it was apps. Everyone was saying, “If you could make an app, what would it be?” I thought, this experience of having an intimate moment with a stranger is so valuable to me and how would I create that on a mass scale for other people?
The idea was that you could send a friend a message and that message would be delivered by a stranger standing in as a surrogate pretending to be you, and you could give directions to the surrogate. The tagline was, “When you can’t be there… Somebody can.” The app was called Somebody. I researched it and realized, this is actually a very expensive app, especially back then. A few months later, Miu Miu asked if I wanted to do a short film and I thought, I’ll do that, but it’s going to be a film about this fictional app and I’d like us to make the app.
There was the sense that technology could make everything be easier and seamless, you wouldn’t even have to leave your home for groceries. This app was kind of built to be inefficient. You could just text your friend or call them on the same device. It was laborious but it put people into interaction.
What has been your artistic experience with AI?
I don’t want everything to become bland and terrible, and especially writing is dear to my heart. I have a teenager, and the process of struggling with something is obviously very useful. That said, I don’t really approach technology in a judgmental way. I’m not an activist, I’m not going to stop AI from happening or put my time into that. The way I feel I have something to offer is by being curious about the technology, maybe misusing it or pushing against it or just even thinking about it. Engaging with it spiritually: what is the implication here?
I’ve used AI but not in a generative way. What I hope is that young people and artists will wrestle with it. I’m not sure there’s a useful position in just being “No AI at all costs.” I don’t think that’s the most powerful way to approach it, even if that is the right approach. I don’t see a way to fight it that doesn’t involve some creative engagement because it’s already part of our imaginations.
I read one of the realizations you had while writing All Fours was that what you thought was you was maybe really other people. How so?
For some reason with my creative work, I’ve always done it my own way even though I’ve seen all these other examples of how it should be done. I never thought there was anything odd about doing all the different mediums or being kind of self-taught or whatever. I felt very free and exploratory. But I have not been that way in the rest of my life.
I believed I would know I was fully mature and wise because I would be sort of aligned with other people’s expectations. I had a lot of self-judgment that I wasn’t quite there yet, like I needed to work on myself more in order to be the right way in a relationship. And that was never going to happen that way just by striving to be like other people.
Rather late in the game I realized, oh, my job is to know myself, to communicate that well and to create situations or commit to situations where the way I actually am is fine.
One of the topics in your 2017 story “The Metal Bowl” is porn. So much traffic on the internet is coming from adult sites. What does it say about our society?
I always forget about porn because I’m so good at supplying my own fantasies. It’s literally my job and I’m great at it. [Laughs]
It seems to be almost like a wellness practice, not using porn. Occasionally I’ll dip in and I’ll be like, “Whoa, this is kind of intense.” And I’ll be surprised to realize that all my friends use it all the time. Talking to a friend recently about it I’m starting to get the picture. I always just assume people are watching porn with their partner and getting turned on together and just making of it what they will, but no.
It’s mostly men alone who, when they are with women, want it to be like that, which is fine if you talk about it. I have a lot of friends who are just getting spit on a lot all of a sudden. And it’s like, wow, really? It’s something that’s not even discussed. That does seem like it could have only come from porn.
I’m hesitant to scold about anything that involves sex because I feel like every single person watching has not had a helping hand in that area, has not had a great sex education or introduction to sex. There’s just so much shame on top of an already shaky foundation.
Maybe one reason why I write about sex is I believe in its healing capacity to be just kind of open and curious.
In your film The Future, Jason goes door to door soliciting tree purchases to stop global warming. This was back in 2011. How is global warming informing your artistic creation and sensibility?
At the time of writing The Future I thought, at least I have to acknowledge that this is happening. I think it was right around then that we began to conceive of, there might not be a future. I’m just making that connection now that you ask me this question.
Now of course the issue is so much louder. It’s in every single thing. Everyone’s constantly pledging or denying or whatever, but it feels like the same again. No, more.
It is unusual to be asked [if there might not be a future] because it takes so much energy to block it out all the time, and so to be asked to think about it is almost an insult to the work you’re doing to keep it at bay. That’s sometimes how it feels even to me. I think I’m putting it in those works to try and break through that feeling.
I think about it in terms of my teenager. It’s really grim to have a child whose conception of the future is really up for grabs. I don’t even know what they’re thinking, but it’s not what I would be thinking.
When you dance you feel things in ways that bypass your intellect. Can you elaborate?
You can’t do anything unless it catches your interest, and it’s a matter of something catching your interest through something other than your mind, which takes a second. When I first am outside in nature it’s done nothing to me yet. But if I spend a little more time I begin to shift, and that’s not happening intellectually. It’s the same thing with dance. Initially you’re focused on how you look or if you’re doing things right. Your mind is like, “I’m the boss here.” But after a while your body is like, “Oh, I can be here, this is for me.”
It’s kind of surprising what the body does on its own, as the leader of the person.
Upcoming event
Infinite Dream: Miranda July in conversation with Melissa Febos, Saturday, Sept. 26, 6 p.m.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s September 2026 issue.
