Chloé Zhao

At 42 years old, Chloé Zhao has this physical status:

Chloé Zhao's first work is her 2009 short film The Atlas Mountains, the story about Helen Thomas who develops a brief yet passionate relationship with an immigrant worker who comes to fix her computer. She also released a second short film titled Daughters, a film about a 14-year-old girl Maple, living in rural China, who is forced into an arranged marriage and takes a dangerous path trying to break free. This short won First Place Student Live Action Short at the 2010 Palm Springs International Short Fest and Special Jury Prize at the 2010 Cinequest Film Festival.

In 2015, Zhao directed her first feature, Songs My Brothers Taught Me. Shot on location at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, the film depicts the relationship between a Lakota Sioux brother and his younger sister. An already existing reservation, the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation has approximately 2.1 million acres, around 46,855 members, and occupies the Oglala Lakota, Jackson, and Bennet counties. In Zhao's film, the brother Johnny plans to leave home and move to Los Angeles with his girlfriend when he graduates high school, but struggles with the thought of leaving his sister Jashaun at home with their troubled mother who is grieving the loss of their father. Focusing on the real lives and struggles of the surrounding community, the film showcases the realness of people and problems they are faced with. In a Filmmaker article, Zhao stated that her rebellious years in her childhood is what pushed her to leave China and study abroad, helping her connect to the plot of the film which focuses on a character struggling in this environment. Half improvised, around 100 hours of footage was collected as Zhao worked with the real residents of the reservation to draw inspiration from their lives and personalities in order to help shape her story. She was able to utilize the natural landscape around her in this film in order to create a place of revelation, where people can be closest to God. Using wide and long shots, she created a documentary-like film that feels authentic, the desolate beauty of the Great Plains creating a story that depicts both freedom and hopelessness. It premiered in 2015 as part of the U.S. Dramatic Competition at Sundance Film Festival. It later played at Cannes Film Festival as part of the Director's Fortnight selection and was nominated for Best First Feature at the 31st Independent Spirit Awards.

In 2017, Zhao directed The Rider, a contemporary western drama, which follows a young cowboy's journey to self-discovery after a near-fatal accident ends his professional riding career. The film was executive produced by her father, Yuji Zhao. As with her first feature, Zhao engaged a cast of non-actors who lived at the filming location, in this case on a ranch. Her inspiration came from Brady Jandreau—a cowboy she had met and befriended on the reservation where she shot her first film—who suffered a severe head injury when thrown from his horse during a rodeo competition. Jandreau would star in the film, playing a fictionalized version of himself as Brady Blackburn. According to an Indiewire article, this film discovers a new side of the Western theme, revolutionary because a Chinese immigrant changing the nation's "oldest genre." The article stated that the film became "the type of film it is because of a man and a woman, because the two of us wanted to work together and understand where we were coming from."

The film premiered at Cannes Film Festival as part of the Directors' Fortnight selection and won the Art Cinema Award. It earned her nominations for Best Feature and Best Director at the 33rd Independent Spirit Awards. At the same ceremony, Zhao became the inaugural winner of the Bonnie Award, named after Bonnie Tiburzi, which recognizes a mid-career female director. The film was released on April 13, 2018, by Sony Pictures Classics and was critically acclaimed. Peter Keough of The Boston Globe wrote: "[The film] achieves what cinema is capable of at its best: It reproduces a world with such acuteness, fidelity, and empathy that it transcends the mundane and touches on the universal."

In 2018, Zhao directed her third feature film, Nomadland, starring Frances McDormand. The adaptation from Jessica Bruder's Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century was shot over four months traveling the American West in an RV with many actual nomadic workers. Bruder's book revolved around characters that can be found in the film, such as Linda May, a 64-year-old living in her van and scrounging for jobs in order to buy land for a permanent home. Other characters, such as Bob Wells, a nomad vlogger of the CheapRVliving YouTube channel and website and in charge of the annual nomad meet-up featured in the film, are real people that Bruder encountered when writing her book and Zhao included in her movie. The film tells the story of a widow who lost everything in The Great Recession and decides to travel in her van across the American Midwest, beginning a journey of self-discovery. Star Frances McDormand and Zhao bonded quickly and inspired each other, and McDormand became a huge element of the filmmaking process and its success. They met a day before the 2018 Independent Spirit Awards, where McDormand was nominated for Best Actress and Zhao received a $50,000 grant for women directors. During the event, they hinted at their future project together. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where it received critical acclaim and won the Golden Lion award, and subsequently played at the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival, where it won the People's Choice Award. The film was released on February 19, 2021, by Searchlight Pictures. Zhao won the Golden Globe Award for Best Director for Nomadland, making her the first woman of Asian descent honored, and only the second woman to win a Golden Globe for directing since Barbra Streisand in 1984. In April 2021, Zhao won the Academy Award for Best Director, becoming the second woman to do so (Kathryn Bigelow being the first).

In September 2018, Marvel Studios hired her to direct Eternals, based on the comic book characters of the same name. The film follows the events of the 2019 Marvel movie Avengers: Endgame, featuring a new team of superheroes that must reunite in order to fight an ancient enemy of the human race, the Deviants. Zhao was heavily influenced by Ridley Scott's Prometheus (2012) and Nick Cassavetes' The Notebook (2004) in crafting the MCU film. It was released on November 5, 2021. Zhao is both the director and one of the four writers of the film, the others being Patrick Burleigh, Ryan Firpo, and Kaz Firpo. Eternals received mixed reviews. The New Yorker stated that Zhao's style of directing dialogue scenes "reveals the absurdity of the script," saying "it might as well have been done via green screen, for the little tangibility and texture that it offers the characters and viewers alike." The article also claimed that the film has reportedly been banned in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait due to the relationship between two male characters, Phastos and Ben. In spite of negative reviews, it still made $161.7 million during its opening weekend and became No. 1 at the box office.

On February 15, 2021, Variety reported that with "34 awards season trophies for directing, 13 for screenplay and nine for editing, Chloe Zhao has surpassed Alexander Payne (Sideways) as the most awarded person in a single awards season in the modern era." In 2021, she appeared on the Time 100, Time's annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

In April 2018, it was announced that Amazon Studios greenlit Zhao's untitled Bass Reeves biopic, a historical Western about the first black U.S. Deputy Marshal. Zhao is set to direct the film and write the screenplay. In February 2021, Variety confirmed that Zhao is tackling the classic Universal monster Dracula, as the writer, producer and director of a new take on the character in the vein of a futuristic sci-fi western. In August 2022, actor Patton Oswalt revealed that a sequel to Eternals was in development with Zhao returning to direct. However, later actor Kumail Nanjiani stated that he had not heard anything about a sequel and believed that Oswalt was wrong.

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