Chloé Zhao Is Officially a Golden Globe Nominee – Now Learn More About Her!

According to a 2013 feature in Filmmaker magazine, Zhao’s international life began early. She was born in Beijing, attended a boarding school in London as a teenager, and eventually went to college at Mount Holyoke in Massachusetts – where she studied political science, not film!

At first, Zhao told Filmmaker magazine, she leaned towards politics and history as a way of detangling her own complicated upbringing. “It goes back to when I was a teenager in China, being in a place where there are lies everywhere,” she said. “You felt like you were never going to be able to get out. A lot of info I received when I was younger was not true, and I became very rebellious toward my family and my background. I went to England suddenly and relearned my history. Studying political science in a liberal arts college was a way for me to figure out what is real. Arm yourself with information, and then challenge that too.”

When she began working a bartender, though, all that changed. She became “turned off by politics” and realized, instead, she liked “meeting people and learning about their histories.” From there, she enrolled in the graduate film program at New York University’s famed Tisch School of the Arts, and the rest is history!

In a 2018 interview with Vogue for her feature The Rider, Zhao revealed her long-standing love for American pop culture. “I have an obsession with the old West,” she told the magazine, explaining how she came to create a film about a Native American cowboy based loosely on a real cowboy she befriended. “I wanted to be where Michael Jackson was,” she added. “A lot of people did.”

While doing the (remote) press for Nomadland, Zhao revealed a fun fact to the Associated Press: her “roommates” at her Ojai, CA, home are three chickens and two dogs!

Back in 2018, Zhao mused to Vogue about the kind of storyteller she wanted to be, and landed on one major thing: hope. “At a time like this, there’s a need to see that there’s good in America. We’re always being told that we have to win all the time. But that’s not real life,” she said. “Our film’s message isn’t the typical Hollywood ending. [The protagonist] has lost something, but he doesn’t give up. He never would.”

She added, “I would never want to make a film without hope.”

“Every year or so I feel the urge to hit the road,” Zhao told the Associated Press. “There is something about taking a shower at 5:30 in the morning at a truck stop. You walk outside and you see the big trucks coming in and you see the sun rising over the mountains. I forget about all the problems. I forget about all the things that I think define who I am, and just feel that transience, people coming in and out and existing.”

Zhao actually lived out of her own van during filming for Nomadland. She even gave it a name: Akira.

Zhao is the director of the upcoming Marvel movie Eternals, focused on a group of immortal aliens who reunite to protect humanity from their evil foes. She’ll be the third female director (and first woman of color) to helm a Marvel feature, following Captain Marvel‘s Anna Boden and Black Widow‘s Cate Shortland.