Her body of work includes film, fiction, monologue, digital presentations and live performance art.

[6] She was raised in Berkeley, California, where she first began staging plays at 924 Gilman Street,[7][5] a local punk rock club.

[5] She later attended the film school at University of California Santa Cruz, but dropped out during her second year and moved to Portland, Oregon.

[13] In an interview for the Tate, she explained that she still tried to practice performance, partially due to its stark differences from filmmaking, such as its live audience or how "present" it is in comparison.

[15][8] At the age of 16, Miranda wrote and directed a play known as The Lifers, which was based on a close connection she had with a man who was incarcerated for murder.

[citation needed] July was immersed in the riot grrl scene in Portland and motivated by its do-it-yourself ethos, and she began an effort that she described as "a free alternative distribution system for women movie-makers".

[22] Thomas W. Gaehtgens, the director of the Getty Research Institute, stated that the acquisition is "an esteemed addition to our Special Collections that connects to work by many important 20th century artists who are also represented in our archives, such as Eleanor Antin, Yvonne Rainer and Carolee Schneemann.

[30] That same month, Evan Rachel Wood, Richard Jenkins, Debra Winger and Gina Rodriguez joined the cast of the film.

[37] A lengthier video, the 27-minute Nest of Tens (2000), juxtaposes four unrelated scenarios in which "seemingly everyday people go about acting completely normal while demonstrating distinct abnormality".

[39][better source needed] Wayne Wang consulted with July about aspects of his 2001 feature-length film The Center of the World,[40] for which she received a story credit.

"[44] This two-hour stage work featured July playing multiple characters, humorously depicting women's perceived cultural roles.

[50] The latter is an abstract view of a grown man and a little girl, seemingly taunted by indistinct floating shapes while an offscreen narrator recounts a tale of real-life pedophilia.

[50] The Swan Tool is another "live movie", a one-woman show in which July plays Lisa Cobb, a woman searching for her lost body.

Although it's peppered with deadpan comedy, the surrealist story concerns "childhood sexual traumas, adult alienation, and persistent, unfocused guilt".

[51] In 2006, after completing her first feature film, she went on to create another multimedia piece, Things We Don't Understand and Definitely Are Not Going To Talk About, which she performed in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York.

[44] In March 2015, July premiered her performance work New Society as part of the 58th San Francisco International Film Festival.

[53] In the program for the performance, July requested the audience not share details of the show, stating it is now "a rare sensation to sit down in a theater with no idea what will happen.

The project's website offered assignments to artists whose submissions became part of "an ever-changing series of exhibitions, screenings and radio broadcasts presented all over the world".

[60] The exhibition was also shown in New York City at Union Square Park and in Los Angeles at the MOCA Pacific Design Center.

Unredacted except for the recipients' names, the emails were freely donated by a disparate group of notable persons including author Sheila Heti, theoretical physicist Lee Smolin, basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and actress Kirsten Dunst.

[61][62] As one reviewer described them, the emails are "simultaneously mundane and eerily revealing; they shed light on how people in the public eye craft their private identities... [they] also underscore, in some way, the way all of us present ourselves over email: excessively formal or passive-aggressive, lovey-dovey, flakey, overly excited.

Somebody is a far-reaching public art project that incites performance and twists our love of avatars and outsourcing – every relationship becomes a three-way.

[66] For its fall 2024 campaign, Prada worked with July on "Now That We're Here", a photo series featuring stars like Hunter Schafer, Letitia Wright, Damson Idris, Harris Dickinson and Ma Yili who encourage people to call into a hotline where they can interact with pre-recorded scripts recorded by July herself.

[67] Her short story The Boy from Lam Kien was published in 2005 by Cloverfield Press, as a special-edition book with illustration by Elinor Nissley and Emma Hedditch.

[70] In The New York Times, Sheelah Kolhatkar gave the collection a mixed review: "A handful of these stories are sweet and revealing, although in many cases the attempt to create 'art' is too self-conscious, and the effort comes off as pointlessly strange.

[72] While procrastinating the writing of her screenplay The Future in 2009, July criss-crossed Los Angeles accompanied by photographer Brigitte Sire to meet a random selection of PennySaver sellers, glimpsing thirteen surprisingly moving and profoundly specific realities, along the way shaping her film, and herself, in unexpected ways.

According to The New York Times, "July has come to personify everything infuriating about the Etsy-shopping, Wes Anderson-quoting, McSweeney's-reading, coastal-living category of upscale urban bohemia that flourished in the aughts [sic]."

She is often lumped in with directors like Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach, but says she gets more push-back than them due to her films being so emotional and feminine, being called "precious" and "twee."

In this same interview with The New York Times, July explains that she likes the directors she's been compared to, but they never get criticized for making films about themselves, though she as a female filmmaker is often labeled "self-obsessed.

[12] She changed her last name to "July" when she was 15, after a character (based on her) in a story by her high school best friend, Johanna Fateman.