About Mira
Anthropologist, Author & Award-Winning Filmmaker
Mira 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.
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.
She is author of Development and Disenchantment in Rural Tunisia (1992), and other works on North Africa and Jewish Studies.
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.
She is also the author of Tali and the Toucan (2024) and Tali and the Timeless Time (2025), a series of children’s books illustrated by South African artists & award-winning illustrators, Chantelle and Burgen Thorne. More Tali to come.
All of the illustrations found on this website are used with permission, gratitude, love, and awe.
