Mira Z. Amiras is an anthropologist, author, and award-winning filmmaker. She was raised on her mother’s accounts of the Inquisition and Holocaust, her father’s tales of the creation and beauty of the universe, and her grandparents’ foods, folklore and music of ancient Sefarad. Mira has lived, studied, and traveled throughout the Middle East and North Africa, camped out 7,000 miles through Africa, and traveled overland from her home in Brussels to the Nepalese border. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley and is Professor Emerita of Comparative Religion and Middle East Studies at San Jose State University. She is author of Development and Disenchantment in Rural Tunisia (1992), and other works on North Africa and Jewish Studies. For more see the links below. Mira is past president of the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness, and was a member of the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association. She lives in San Francisco with her family.
Current Work
Mira is founder and director of Something Will Emerge Productions which produced the award-winning animated film, The Day before Creation (2021), as well as the lauded illustrated volume Malkah’s Notebook: A Journey into the Mystical AlephBet (2022), illustrated by the award-winning artist and sofer, Josh Baum. Forthcoming is TALI— a series of children’s books illustrated by South African artists, Chantelle and Burgen Thorne, award-winning illustrators of numerous children’s books. The first of our collaborations is Tali and the Toucan, which will emerge August 2024.
The illustrations found on this website are by Josh Baum and Chantelle and Burgen Thorne produced for Something Will Emerge Productions. Used with permission, gratitude, love, and awe.
