Maryam Mir | Brooklyn, NY
Five Times a Day
Film, shot on 16mm, 4:10 min. (2019)
Inspired by Muslim food cart vendors in New York City who pray beside their carts, this film presents prayer as normal, mundane, and sometimes frustratingly inconvenient amid the cacophony of metropolitan life. It counters the narrative of public prayer as unusual in America, and celebrates the beautiful normalcy of Muslim acts of faith.
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Maryam Mir
As a Canadian citizen born in Germany, raised in Bahrain, of Kashmiri origin, with Kenyan ancestry, Maryam has always found comfort in her intersections. Her artistic practice mirrors her identity; She is constantly fascinated by work that expands forms and crosses genres, hybrid stories that explore migration and movement in all its fractures. She is currently pursuing her MFA in the Grad Film program at NYU Tisch, where she is eager to experiment with the interplay of fiction, documentary and animation.
Previously, she has worked as a strategist at SYPartners, a creative consultancy focused on transforming organizations through storytelling and design, completed a Summer Residency in Documentary Filmmaking at the School of Visual Arts and was a 2019 Open City Fellow at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, where she wrote narrative nonfiction about Muslim communities in New York City.
In her spare time, she likes to experiment with doodles and animation on Instagram (@mmircat).