Do we like Chloé Zhao?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Decent record, no harmful words or acts found, and real good on LGBTQ+ inclusion and animal rescue, but the public record on other causes is thin.
Zhao was born in Beijing as Zhao Ting, the daughter of a steel-industry executive, and by her own account and press profiles she was a rebellious kid and a poor student. She was sent to boarding school in England at 14, finished high school in Los Angeles, then studied political science at Mount Holyoke before film school at NYU.
Her early films, Songs My Brothers Taught Me (Sundance, 2015) and The Rider (Cannes, 2017), were small, tender stories shot with non-actors in the American West. That led to Nomadland, which won Best Picture and Best Director at the 2021 Oscars and made her the first woman of colour to win Best Director. Then came Marvel's Eternals, and in 2025 Hamnet.
On the harm check, the record is clean as far as we could find. She told reporters she'd spoken with Marvel about not censoring the gay content in Eternals for overseas markets, adding “Fingers crossed”. She also said Phastos, the MCU's first openly gay superhero, was written into the story before she came aboard. We found nothing harmful on trans people, women, migrants or the climate, and equally not much said on climate or migration at all, so that's a gap rather than a tick.
Nothing new on her lately in the way of fresh stoushes. Hamnet earned her a second Best Director nomination, but Paul Thomas Anderson took the prize in March 2026 and Hamnet won one Oscar, Best Actress for Jessie Buckley. In May she sat on the main Cannes competition jury under Park Chan-wook. In TheWrap's February cover story she called empathy “the medicine the world needs” and said she's in a quiet “winter” before her next project.
The good stuff is quieter than the trophies. In March 2026 she joined a Charitybuzz fundraiser, offering a virtual cup of tea to benefit Animal Rescue Kharkiv, a nonprofit helping animals affected by Russia's war on Ukraine. We couldn't find how much it raised, and we found no big named foundation or donation, so that's honestly the whole list.
We searched for court cases and for allegations about how she behaves on set or with staff and turned up nothing. Put together, that's a director with a clean harm record, a pro-LGBTQ+ stance in her most mainstream film, and a good-natured public manner. She's a safe one to love.