Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi Biography

Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi is a documentary filmmaker most known for her work on the film Free Solo, which received the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2019. Alex Honnold and his free solo ascent of El Capitan in June 2017 were featured in the film. Vasarhelyi began her film career as an assistant to director Mike Nichols on the film Closer and has documented events such as the Dakar Rally with Emmy-Award-winning cinematographer Scott Duncan. A Normal Life, her debut film, received Best Documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2003. Youssou N'Dour: I Bring What I Love, her second film, was released in theaters in the United States and across the world. The film premiered at the Telluride and Toronto Film Festivals and went on to win several accolades, including the Special Jury Prize at the Middle East International Film Festival in 2008 and a nomination for the Pare Lorentz Award at the International Documentary Association Awards in 2009. Vasarhelyi finished Touba, a documentary on the yearly Mouride pilgrimage, the Grand Magaal, in Touba, Senegal, in 2013. It had its world premiere at SXSW 2013, where it received the Special Jury Prize for Best Cinematography. She returned to Senegal to capture the presidential elections of 2012 with the film Incorruptible (previously An African Spring), which received the Independent Spirit Truer Than Fiction Award in 2015. Meru, the top earning independent documentary film of 2015, was one of Vasarhelyi's works as a filmmaker in 2015. (Oscars Shortlist 2016; Sundance Audience Award 2015) At the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival, Vasarhelyi and Chin's film Free Solo won the People's Choice Award: Documentaries. The film has earned critical acclaim for being both an engrossing documentary and a meaningful narrative of human achievement. The Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature went to Free Solo in 2019. Vasarhelyi has directed a New York Times Op Doc, a non-fiction design episode for Netflix's ABSTRACT, and two episodes for ESPN's Future of Sports. Sundance Institute, Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Bertha Britdoc, William and Mary Greve Foundation, and National Endowment for the Arts have all given Vasarhelyi funds. She was designated a 2013 Sundance Documentary Film Fellow, one of Filmmaker magazine's 25 New Faces of Independent Film in 2005, and a Creative Visions Foundation Achievement Award recipient in 2008.

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