Filmmaker Miranda Yousef AB ’98 entered Harvard thinking she was going to be a poet and landed happily in the Comparative Literature Department. “That was a time when the field was becoming very interdisciplinary, so prior to that, it was like, ‘Okay, I'm going to go study the use of the brooch in 17th century French literature as compared to the necklace in 20th century Egyptian literature or something like that.’” Miranda laughs. “It was becoming more about applying the techniques of literary analysis to other fields of artwork… I was taking classes in music and visual arts, but probably most importantly, film theory. As a junior, I was enrolled in an Eastern European cinema class with Svetlana Boym, where we would watch a movie at the Carpenter Center every week… One week, they screened a Russian art film called MIRROR by Andrei Tarkovsky. And I remember, after the film, I just sat there in my seat for a full 10 minutes without saying anything. I was just so blown away.” That was the moment Miranda knew that filmmaking was what she wanted to do with the rest of her life. 

After graduation, she moved to Singapore for a year to teach abroad (and made one short film there which she hopes “never sees the light of day”), then applied to UCLA upon her return to the U.S. She was accepted to their MFA program in Film Directing and Production. “It's kind of a boot camp the first year,” she recalls. “You learn all of the basic production positions. We were shooting on 16mm. My class was the last class that used flatbeds. You would spool your film dailies onto a reel, play it, stop where you wanted to make a cut, and use a grease pencil to mark it; and then you would take it off of the reels and use a splicer to actually physically cut the film strip… Up until a certain point, all the great Hollywood film editors were working on that kind of machine.”

Miranda’s thesis film won a DGA Student Film Award and got distribution through a Canadian short film distribution company. “I was coming out of film school with my bright eyes and my bushy tail and my notion that it was all gonna happen,” Miranda jokes. “That did not happen.” She worked for the Sundance Film Festival for several years, and that’s where in 2006 she ran into Doug Blush, a very accomplished documentary editor, producer, and director. “He was at Sundance that year because he had edited a film called WORDPLAY, which was about the New York Times crossword puzzle… That film made a huge splash,” Miranda remembers. “It was a real crowd-pleaser. It was very well done. Doug had been my production sound teacher at UCLA. So, we ran into each other on the bus, and I said, ‘I'm looking to get into documentary editing.’ And he said, ‘Oh, great!’ And then a few months later, he called me.” 

Miranda then worked as the assistant editor on a film with Doug, who she describes as “the kind of mentor that you want, because he was interested in fostering and nurturing me… He was a cheerleader for my professional advancement and development, and I would not have a career if it wasn't for Doug Blush.” After that, things started taking off.

Miranda met her producing (and life) partner in film school, and they’ve been together ever since. “We really love working together,” Miranda says. “He was working as a producer and an executive, and then when the pandemic hit, we found ourselves with the opportunity, finally, to collaborate on a feature. We were talking with some artist friends of ours during the pandemic, and they mentioned that there was something interesting and unusual about Thomas Kinkade. Now younger readers are not going to necessarily know who Kinkade was, but he was huge in the 1990s and the early 2000s. He painted these completely anodyne cottages and gardens, and basically, he had presented himself as this upstanding, wholesome American painter for the evangelical Christian population who didn't have a connection to fine art, or felt alienated from the world of fine art. But then he died in a cloud of scandal, and what we learned was that after his death, his four daughters went into the vault where he kept all of his work––and they discovered this whole other body of work that's dark, bizarre, and psychologically complex, and completely different from the work that he had been known for.” 

Miranda and her husband instantly knew they had stumbled on a gold mine. “In addition to these hundreds of thousands of photographs and thousands of artworks, they had hundreds of hours of cassette tapes where he had started recording himself and his thoughts on art since he was 16 years old in 1974…. There was obviously a story there. We got the money through the Sundance Catalyst Forum, and we made the movie in record time: 13 months from the start of filming to delivery. We premiered at South by Southwest in 2023, had our festival run in 2023 and 2024, and released it in theaters in 2025. We wound up on several best-of lists at the end of 2025, including the New York Times and BBC, and we were nominated for a Critics Choice Award for Best First Documentary Feature.” ART FOR EVERYBODY was a real success. 

As a first-time feature director, but with a long list of features under her editor’s belt, Miranda relied on her editing toolkit to approach pre-production and production. “It was an interview- and archival-driven film, so I laid out a cork board with colored index cards, and we wrote down what the scenes were going to be. I did some pre-interviews in order to be able to do that, and then we just kind of went from there: I need a scene where we do this, my interviews have to address these topics.” Miranda notes that it’s crucial to know what you want to talk about as you move into the filming process, but also, “to be open to the vicissitudes of the universe. Perhaps you may get slightly derailed, but if the subject gives you something unexpected, it’s usually worth exploring that.” Flexibility and adaptation are key in the documentary-making process. Miranda concludes: “As an editor working for quite a number of years, I have become very used to killing darlings. There is a long, bloody trail of darlings in my wake.” 

Another key to documentaries is that you have a willing subject. “If you're going to make a film about somebody, you want it to be someone who wants to tell their story––who's ready to tell their story,” Miranda says. “If they don't want to, and you're trying to pull it out of them, they're not going to give you what you want. They're not going to be honest with you, they're not going to be open, it's not going to work.”

As for how she decides what will make a compelling subject, like with Kinkade, Miranda says, “It has to ring a bell inside of me. I'm really interested in stories where you can talk about larger human or social themes, but through the lens of a compelling character story. So, the Kinkade film, on the surface, was about ‘Who is the real Thomas Kinkade?’ But it really was about ‘What is Art, and who gets to decide?’ It was about the politicization of taste. It was about how our culture and our politics create each other.” 

Miranda believes that audiences really respond to authenticity. “When you are working with footage where a person is showing you who they are without meaning to… I love that. I think all films can make us feel less alone. I believe that the service that documentary provides to its subjects is it gives them the chance to have a voice. So, for instance, with ART FOR EVERYBODY, Thomas Kinkade was a huge celebrity, and his persona and his business cast such a long, dark shadow over his four daughters and his wife that their voices were never really heard. They were a part of this package that he was selling, but nobody ever saw them. So I really wanted to give them the opportunity to have their voices heard. I think that people really appreciate that, if you do it with respect and compassion and love.” Miranda also notes that “it's really important to be ethical when you're doing this. It's a service. If you're doing it for your own glory, then I don't think you're in it for the right reasons. Documentary is in this weird place between journalism and fiction film… You have the capacity to be experimental and artistic in a way, to play with aesthetics in a way that journalism doesn't, but at the same time, I do think you need to be as accurate as you possibly can… I think audiences can sniff it out when you are lying to them or being inauthentic; but also, it's a betrayal. When you're interviewing people and you're asking them to honor you with their story, you are asking a great deal. That's a precious thing that they're giving you, so I think that you have to treat it as sacred.”

This goes along with the questions Miranda asks herself on every shoot: how do we get to the emotional and spiritual truth here? How can we treat our characters with compassion? “One of my guiding principles is that you have to love your subjects. I don't mean to be in love with your subject, and I definitely don't mean only see them through rose-colored glasses. What I mean is to accept the whole of them for who they are, and treat them with compassion.” That, too, is Miranda’s advice for aspiring documentarians. “Treat everyone with respect,” she says. “Don't go in thinking that you know more than everyone else … You can learn something from everyone.”