The Chinese-born American director whose Nomadland Best Director Oscar made her the second woman and first woman of colour to win the prize. Her career trajectory across three indie features into MCU production and back is one of the most-significant of the post-2018 period.
Chloé Zhao began directing in 2015 with the low-budget independent feature Songs My Brothers Taught Me, set on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Her second feature, The Rider (2017), was set in the same rural South Dakota landscape and worked with non-professional cast members performing versions of their actual lives. Her third feature, Nomadland (2020), won three Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director — making Zhao the second woman to win Best Director (after Kathryn Bigelow in 2010) and the first woman of colour to win the prize.
Her subsequent career has produced one of the most-significant working-director trajectories of recent years. Eternals (2021) was her first major-studio film — a Marvel Cinematic Universe entry that received mixed reception and represented a structural departure from her previous working approach. Hamnet (2025) — her adaptation of Maggie O'Farrell's novel about Shakespeare's son's death — represented a return to the prestige-drama category and recovered substantial critical standing.
What distinguishes Zhao's career is the willingness to work at radically different scales across consecutive productions. The $4m Nomadland was followed by the $200m Eternals; the underperforming Eternals was followed by the substantially-smaller-budget Hamnet. Few working directors have navigated this kind of scale variation at her level of standing.
Zhao's pre-Nomadland filmography was built almost entirely on non-professional cast members performing versions of their actual lives. The Rider's lead Brady Jandreau is a real Pine Ridge rodeo rider; the film tracks a version of his actual story (including the traumatic-brain-injury rehabilitation that the film depicts). Nomadland extended the approach — Frances McDormand and David Strathairn are the only credited professional leads; the rest of the cast is largely real van-dwellers playing versions of themselves.
The technique requires Zhao to commit substantial pre-production time to building relationships with the actual communities her films depict. The Nomadland production reportedly involved a year of Zhao living mobile with the van-dwelling community before the screenplay reached its final form. The investment produces a register of performance that conventional cinema does not always achieve. The cumulative emotional weight of Nomadland depends, structurally, on the audience reading the supporting cast as actual people rather than as performers.
Joshua James Richards is Zhao's longtime cinematographer (also her romantic partner). Richards has shot every Zhao feature; the working partnership is one of the most-distinctive contemporary American director-cinematographer collaborations. The visual approach across Zhao's filmography — natural-light cinematography, magic-hour shooting, wide landscape framing, careful attention to weathered surfaces and elderly faces — is, in some sense, the Richards-Zhao collaboration as visible signature.
The collaboration produced one of the most-distinctive visual approaches in contemporary American independent cinema. Subsequent directors interested in the natural-light, observation-based register have studied the Zhao-Richards work closely. The Eternals production briefly imported the Richards visual approach into MCU production scale; the result was visually distinctive but commercially divisive, partly because the Marvel-house aesthetic the studio expected was, in places, displaced by the Richards-style natural-light framing.
Almost every Zhao film engages contemporary American rural or marginal landscape. Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota (Songs My Brothers Taught Me, The Rider). The American West's mobile-van-dwelling communities (Nomadland). The pre-modern English countryside (Hamnet, although shot in England, structurally extends the rural-landscape engagement). Zhao's interest is in landscapes that mainstream cinema typically does not engage seriously — the post-industrial small towns, the rural Western open spaces, the communities operating outside the contemporary economic mainstream.
The technique gives Zhao's films a documentary-ethnographic register that elevates the dramatic material. The audience is asked to attend to landscapes and communities as actual physical realities rather than as backdrop. The result is filmmaking that operates simultaneously as character drama and as observational portraiture. Almost no other working American director sustains this dual operation at her level.
If you've never watched a Zhao film:
Terrence Malick (Zhao has explicitly cited as foundational), Italian neorealism, the broader observational-documentary tradition, and the rural-landscape American cinema tradition that runs from John Ford through Sam Peckinpah and Kelly Reichardt.