Chloé Zhao
Chloé Zhao (born March 31, 1982, Beijing, China) is a Chinese filmmaker known for absorbing and closely observed movies about journeys of self-discovery set in the American West. Her films delve into rarely explored strata of American society. For Nomadland (2020), she became the first person of colour to win the Academy Award for best director.
Zhao’s father was an executive at a major steel company and later worked in real estate and equity investment, while her mother worked at a hospital. Zhao was uninterested in school in Beijing, preferring to focus on manga and movies. Although she spoke little English, in 1998 her parents sent her to England, where she attended the Sussex boarding school Brighton College from 1998 to 2000. She completed high school in Los Angeles and then enrolled in Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, where she studied politics with a minor in film studies (B.A., 2005). Finding herself drawn to telling untold stories through film, she then attended New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts (B.A., 2010). Her graduate film was the short movie Daughters (2010), about a rural Chinese girl escaping an arranged marriage.
For her first feature film, Zhao developed a script about an Oglala Lakota boy living on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. As she spent more time there, she repeatedly revised the story as she learned more from the people on the reservation, and the resulting story centres on a boy graduating from high school who is torn between following his girlfriend to Los Angeles and staying home to take care of his younger sister and his mother. The movie, Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2015), was lyrical and resonant and received positive notice at the Sundance Film Festival and at the Cannes film festival. As with many of her subsequent works, she mostly cast nonprofessional actors.
Zhao’s second movie, The Rider (2017), was inspired when she met rodeo bronco rider and horse trainer Brady Jandreau on the Pine Ridge reservation. She wanted to make him the centre of a movie and had begun filming when Jandreau was thrown by a bronco and suffered a crushed skull. Zhao wrote a loosely biographical story about Jandreau—who played the character based on him—coming to terms with the fact that the injury will prevent him from safely continuing to ride horses. The Rider won the top prize at the Directors’ Fortnight, the independent-film section at Cannes.
Zhao next drew inspiration from Jessica Bruder’s nonfiction book about retirement-age Americans living in RVs—generally vans—and traveling around the country in search of low-paying jobs. The book, Nomadland: Surviving America in the 21st Century (2017), caught the attention of actress Frances McDormand, who also admired the movie The Rider. McDormand collaborated with Zhao to produce Nomadland (2020), in which McDormand played the fictional character Fern, a widow who takes to the road after the gypsum plant where she works goes out of business. The other characters in the movie were the nomads featured in Bruder’s book. The beautifully honest and poetic film won numerous awards, including the Academy Award for best picture, and Zhao became the second woman to win the Oscar for best director. She also received nominations for her editing and her screenplay.
In 2021 Zhao shifted gears with Eternals, an action movie that was part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It centres on a group of immortals who join forces to prevent an impending apocalypse. Zhao cowrote the film, which received mixed reviews.