Long before he became an unlikely political force, Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani was just another 20-something trying to squeeze a laugh out of his Saturday improv class in Manhattan.
“I went to Magnet Theater for Improv Level One,” Mamdani said of that winter in 2017, when his eight-week course at the Chelsea theater ended in a student showcase. “I think I had dreams of going to the Upright Citizens Brigade.”
When he is sworn in on Jan. 1 as the city’s first Muslim and South Asian mayor and, at 34, one of its youngest, Mamdani will also be the rare city leader whose cultural upbringing was both cosmopolitan, as the son of the Oscar-nominated filmmaker Mira Nair and the scholar Mahmood Mamdani, and local, imbued with a distinctly streets-of-New York energy.
In interviews, the mayor-elect, his mother and others recently spoke about the influences that shaped him, like Indian ragas and classic musicals, New York’s most august institutions and its dank basement performance spaces. He will almost certainly be the only mayor, for example, who attended — and name-checked — a show called “Asssscat 3000.”
Early Experiences
His immersion in all facets of urban culture was organic, said Nair, the Indian-born filmmaker who moved to New York in 1979. “Knowing the city made it possible for us to also do a variety of things, you know? The best thing he would say, my favorite line: ‘Mama, let’s wander.’”
They would encounter century-old immigrant life at the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side, then stroll through Chinatown. Storm King Art Center, the modernist sculpture park north of the city, was another must. “We went probably three times a year,” Nair said.
Other cultural forays would be familiar to many New York City kids: Mamdani saw “The Lion King” on Broadway and loved the American Museum of Natural History.
Growing up, he wasn’t allowed to watch TV during the school week, he said, but the tech-savvy boy figured out how to circumvent that at the start of the streaming era. “I would watch a copious amount of TV on my computer,” he said.
His parents were not wise to it: “I did not know that until this moment,” Nair said, laughing.
A favorite show was the nerdy late-2000s sitcom “Chuck,” which “was seemingly on the verge of cancellation every single year,” Mamdani recalled.
He was exposed to indie cinema at art-house theaters like the Angelika Film Center in NoHo, and joined his mother on sets and at film festivals, meeting other filmmakers. Guillermo del Toro once drew him a sketch of a movie character, which Mamdani treasured. When he was about 6, an early screening of the Serbian romp “Black Cat, White Cat” made an impression — he remembers watching the credits, “seeing how many Zorans were on the crew, and feeling very, very excited,” he said — so Nair introduced him to the work of its celebrated director, her friend Emir Kusturica.
But Mamdani’s parents also indulged his movie tastes, which ran to Hollywood buddy cop flicks. “My dad sat through many, many hours of ‘Rush Hour,’” he said. (That’s also the film franchise that President Trump has pushed to revive under the director Brett Ratner at Paramount.)
Comedy
Comedy was a mainstay. “I remember loving the Blue Man Group,” Mamdani said, of the long-running, proudly absurd Off Broadway show. “Which, incidentally, is where our field director worked for many years.”
In his teens and 20s, he would line up for U.C.B.’s late-night shows (like the improvised “Asssscat”) at its Chelsea theater, where tickets were $5 or less, and the audience often sat on the floor. “I was generally on the search for anything that was affordable,” the mayor-elect said. But those performances stayed with him; laughing, he recalled a 2008 bit by the comic Kumail Nanjiani, comparing the Coney Island Cyclone to the invention of sliced bread.
That Mamdani is faster on his feet, zinger-wise, than most politicians became clear during his campaign. Did the improv training help? He was “a super-game, very thoughtful student,” said Rick Andrews, his teacher at Magnet. “Just had a really positive energy.” Any one-liners came from attuned listening, Andrews said. His skill was “being comfortable with uncertainty, and being in the moment.”
The Performing Arts
With roots in Uganda, where Mamdani was born and his father was raised, the family was always enmeshed in immigrant narratives and cross-continental art. In New York, Nair said, they regularly attended performances by Akram Khan, the English Bangladeshi artist who choreographs Indian classical dance and modern movement.
But Mamdani’s overarching cultural influence probably came through music. Even before his brief career as the rapper Mr. Cardamom, he associated music with “so many of my memories of childhood,” he said. “The rhythms of life growing up was that every morning as we had chai, as we have breakfast, there would be music playing.” It was often an alap, the melodic opening of raga, performed by Vilayat Khan, the Indian sitar master.
The Pakistani American singer Ali Sethi, now a star, was a family friend early on. “He was an undergraduate here, singing,” Nair said.
Mamdani and Sethi also filled in at staged readings when Nair was developing her movie “Monsoon Wedding” into a musical, around 2016. Sethi sang a secondary role, and Mamdani, borrowing a lime-green blouse from his mother, acted it out. “Zohran just leapt on the chairs,” Nair recalled, “really a lively performance.” A backer was convinced, and Nair offered her son a part. But he was “a reluctant actor,” she said, and declined: “He said, ‘Mama, people die for this stuff. I don’t.’”
When the show opened at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn in 2023, “I cast a look-alike,” she said.
The Visual Arts
The acclaimed painter Salman Toor — Sethi’s partner — was another fixture in Mamdani’s orbit. When Toor was an M.F.A. student at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, Nair commissioned a family portrait. In 2009, he made a study of a teenage Mamdani for it, using ocher tones to capture a soft-serious gaze and the hint of an adolescent mustache. “The moment it was finished, I knew it would be impossible to recreate that particular spark in another painting,” Toor said. Looking at it now, he added, it seems to have “its own little magnetic field.” The family portrait is so large that it’s tricky to display, Nair said, but her son’s small image hangs in her study.
Mamdani credits his wife, the artist Rama Duwaji, with reshaping his understanding of visual art. On her Instagram, she regularly highlights things that, as she puts it, “made me want to make art” — gallery exhibitions and animation, but also the slant of a lampshade or the architecture of bodega ramps.
“I’m so lucky to be married to my wife,” he said in the interview. “The way that she sees the world and how she sees beauty, it’s expanded my sense of art as not just something you see in a museum or on a screen or in a kind of formal setting, but also part of the everyday.”
With her influence in mind, he named his favorite museum: “our subway system.”
Not “the crumbling nature of infrastructure,” he explained, but the design program that puts “beautiful murals and pieces of art across our subway system. And the fulfillment of art as being something for the public to engage with, no matter how much money is in their pocket.”
The labor of creativity was something he was intimately familiar with, Nair said. “His love for what people make themselves — whether it is a thing or an idea, that’s what he’s charged by.”
Mamdani has little time for cultural exploration now. But he still had a plan for what he wanted to see next. No surprise, as a resident and booster of Queens, that it involves a Queens institution.
“I’ve spent many months trying to finish the ‘Mission: Impossible’ series,” he said, watching it in 20-minute spurts. “I am very eager to finish that with my wife, and then hopefully get to the Museum of the Moving Image, if they still have the exhibition up on that same series.”
Zachary Small contributed reporting.
Melena Ryzik is a roving culture reporter at The Times, covering the personalities, projects and ideas that drive the creative world.
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