5 Things To Know About Chloé Zhao
credit: @focusfeatures
Chloe Zhao is the first Asian Woman to win an Oscar for Best Director and Best Film for Nomadland and as of 2026 has won a Golden Globe for Best Picture, Hamnet. She is also the second woman to have won for Best Director in the history of the Academy Awards. If only both of those sentences weren’t made for history purpose, but alas, it is a thrill and proud moment to have this happening in our lifetime. The struggle is real, and now so are the achievements.
Her real name is Zhao Ting and was born and raised in Beijing, China with a taste for rebelliousness and Western pop culture. Educated in London, but then moved to Los Angeles to attend college and eventually film school at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.
I like to think that there are a hundred or more Chloe Zhao’s out there also in film school, because that just means the door has been opened, wide and clear for every Asian and Pacific Islander to be given opportunities.
Her 2015 debut film Songs My Brother Taught Me is a melancholic journey inside Native American society. Similar to Nomadland, Zhao also casted nonprofessional actors. (*Watch the film)
In 2017, Zhao’s second feature film The Rider, a feminist take on a contemporary western drama, won Best Feature & Best Director at the Independent Spirit Awards.
Spike Lee was one of her professors at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.
*photo credit; NY Mag / Amanda Demme
In a 2013 interview w/Filmmaker Magazine when asked why she makes films about the American heartland, Zhao said “It goes back to when I was a teenager in China, being in a place where there are lies everywhere.”
In this interview in Renegades, she is asked what she wanted to be growing up. Chloe was obsessed with Japanese manga and considered being a manga artist and manga writer.
credit: @chloezhao
