Biography

Chai Vasarhelyi, along with her filmmaking partner and husband Jimmy Chin, is an Academy® Award-winning filmmaker. They are the directors and producers of “Free Solo,” an intimate, unflinching portrait of rock climber Alex Honnold, which won a BAFTA, seven Emmy awards, and the Academy® Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2019. Their first film together, “Meru,” won the Audience Award at Sundance in 2015. More recently, they directed and produced “Wild Life”, A sweeping portrait of conservationists Kris and Doug Tompkins chronicling their fight to preserve wild land in Chile and Argentina.

Other projects include BAFTA and DGA-nominated documentary “The Rescue,” chronicling the against-all-odds rescue of twelve boys and their coach from deep inside a flooded cave in Northern Thailand, “Return to Space,” which hit the top 10 on Netflix’s most watched films list, and the National Geographic series “Edge of the Unknown With Jimmy Chin”. Chin and Vasarhelyi's first scripted feature, “Nyad”, about Diana Nyad's swim from Cuba to Florida and starring Jodie Foster and Annette Bening is now streaming on Netflix.

Vasarhelyi’s other films as a director include “Incorruptible” (Truer Than Fiction Independent Spirit Award 2016); “Youssou N’Dour: I Bring What I Love”, which premiered at the Telluride and Toronto Film Festivals; “A Normal Life” (Tribeca Film Festival, Best Documentary 2003); and “Touba” (SXSW, Jury Prize Best Cinematography 2013). Vasarhelyi has received grants from the Sundance Institute, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Bertha Britdoc, and the National Endowment of the Arts. She is a member of the DGA, AMPAS, and holds a B.A. in comparative literature from Princeton University.