Salaam led to nearly 20 more successful independent films, all backed by Nair's production company, Mirabai Films. "I started my own company by sheer necessity," she says. "I was the ultimate outsider, in the sense of wanting to make documentaries about, say, East Asian immigrants in New Jersey, or their lives back in India. It was hard enough to find people that wanted to work on those projects. But then to find people to finance them and trying to get them to see what kind of world you’re talking about? Well, I had to do it myself."

Nearly three decades later, Nair says she's still often surprised by just how exclusive Hollywood can be, both when it comes to ethnicity and gender. "It’s sometimes paradoxical regarding diversity," she says. "India is considered to be such a traditional society regarding men and women, but the existence of women directors behind the camera is much more common there than in America. Which is troubling, because though women are so much a part of the fabric of life, in Hollywood, we have not been regarded as such.”

For her part, Nair has never been content to sit around and wait for more women or more racial diversity to appear on screen. She's simply made it happen herself. Her latest feat is this fall's hit Disney film Queen of Katwe, which stars newbie actress Madina Nalwanga as Phiona, a girl from Uganda who becomes a world-renowned chess champion with a little help from her coach (David Oyelowo) and some reluctant encouragement from her mother, played by Lupita Nyong'o.