Chloé Zhao, the Nomadland director who keeps her camera at human height

Chloé Zhao

Photo: Harald Krichel / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 31, 1982 Beijing, China
Occupation	Film director
Known for	Eternals, Nomadland, Hamnet
Awards	2 Academy Award · Golden Lion · Golden Globe · BAFTA · Directors Guild of America · TIFF People's Choice

Chloé Zhao’s films start from a face the camera did not invent. A Lakota teenager weighing whether to leave the Pine Ridge Reservation, a rodeo rider told that one more fall could kill him: the people at the centre of her early work played versions of themselves, and the Chinese filmmaker built a career, and two Oscars, on the conviction that the person in front of the lens knows more than the script does. What has followed her ever since is a question of size. Marvel tested whether that conviction could survive a franchise. A television revival tested it and lost. Hamnet, her film about the grief inside Shakespeare’s household, is the strongest answer she has given so far.

She grew up in Beijing, in comfort rather than in the margins her films would later visit. Her father, Zhao Yuji, was an executive at the state steel giant Shougang; after her parents divorced he married Song Dandan, one of China’s best-known sitcom actresses. The teenager who would one day film cowboys spent her school years drawing manga-style comics and writing fan fiction, a self-described rebellious and lazy student. Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together is, in her own words, the film that made her want to make films.

Born Zhao Ting on 31 March 1982, she was sent at fifteen to Brighton College in England, still learning English. In 2000 she moved alone to Los Angeles, rented an apartment in Koreatown and finished high school there. At Mount Holyoke College she majored in politics and minored in film, graduating in 2005, then tended bar and worked odd jobs until she noticed that what she liked was listening to strangers describe their lives. That instinct took her to the graduate film programme at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where Spike Lee was among her teachers and where she met the English cinematographer Joshua James Richards, her partner and the man behind the camera on her early features until they separated in 2023.

Her shorts, The Atlas Mountains and Daughters, won festival prizes, but the method arrived with Songs My Brothers Taught Me. Shot on Pine Ridge with residents of the reservation, partly improvised and assembled from around a hundred hours of footage, it premiered in the US Dramatic Competition at Sundance in 2015 and travelled to the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes. A grant from Chris Columbus, she has said, made it possible. The Rider pushed the idea further: Brady Jandreau, a young Lakota horse trainer recovering from a head injury, plays a rider in his own situation, surrounded by his real family. It won the Art Cinema Award in the Directors’ Fortnight in 2017, and critics read it as a western remade from the inside by an outsider.

Nomadland changed the scale of her reputation without changing the method. Frances McDormand plays Fern, a widow who takes to the road after her company town disappears, and many of the people she meets are nomadic workers from Jessica Bruder’s book, playing themselves. Zhao wrote, produced, edited and directed it. The film won the Golden Lion in Venice and the People’s Choice Award in Toronto in 2020; in April 2021 it won the Academy Award for Best Picture and Zhao won Best Director, the second woman to do so after Kathryn Bigelow and the first woman of colour. She also took the directing prizes at the Golden Globes, the Directors Guild and the BAFTAs.

The triumph had a shadow, and it came from Beijing. After the Golden Globe, Chinese state media rushed to claim her win for the country, until nationalist users dug up a 2013 Filmmaker magazine interview in which she described China as “a place where there are lies everywhere”. A 2020 interview had misquoted her as saying “The US is now my country”; she had said “not”, and the correction came two months late. Nomadland never opened in Chinese cinemas, and her Oscar was censored at home. Then came Eternals. Marvel had hired her in 2018, and the 2021 film topped the box office on its opening weekend while drawing the worst reviews of her career; The New Yorker complained that her handling of the dialogue scenes exposed the absurdity of the script. Reviewers who credited her real locations and natural light missed the more uncomfortable reading: the method that made non-actors look enormous did not scale to ten superheroes and a cosmic deadline.

Hamnet was the correction. Adapted with Maggie O’Farrell from her novel, produced by Amblin with Steven Spielberg aboard, it follows Agnes, played by Jessie Buckley, and her husband William, played by Paul Mescal, through the death of their eleven-year-old son. Zhao shot it in Herefordshire and Wales in the summer of 2024 with the cinematographer Łukasz Żal, had Max Richter’s music playing on set to set the tone, and kept the camera close to bodies and weather rather than to the theatre. It premiered at Telluride in August 2025 and won the People’s Choice Award in Toronto, her second.

The awards run that followed was long and slightly bittersweet. Hamnet won Best Motion Picture – Drama at the Golden Globes and Outstanding British Film at the BAFTAs, then collected eight Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Director for Zhao, making her only the second woman after Jane Campion with two directing nominations. On 15 March 2026 the film won one: Best Actress for Buckley. The day before, Sarah Michelle Gellar had announced that Hulu would not go forward with Buffy the Vampire Slayer: New Sunnydale, the revival whose pilot Zhao directed; Deadline’s sources called the pilot not perfect. On the Oscars red carpet Zhao said she was “not surprised”.

The rest of her year has been spent judging other people’s work. In May she sat on the Cannes competition jury chaired by Park Chan-wook, and in late October she was one of the judges of Instagram’s Rings awards in New York, looking, she said, for creators who notice “the extraordinary in the ordinary”. She describes herself as neurodivergent and calls it a superpower. A Mission: Impossible rumour that spread this year was debunked, and no next feature has been confirmed.

That silence is the interesting part. Zhao has made small films that felt vast and one vast film that felt small; Hamnet found the ground between them. “Every story needs its own unique ecosystem, and the scale should serve the story first,” she said in October. Whatever she chooses next will show which size she trusts.