Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi is an Academy Award-winning filmmaker. In 2019, she and co-director Jimmy Chin won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, a BAFTA, and seven Emmy Awards for Free Solo, an intimate, unflinching portrait of rock climber Alex Honnold. In 2023, the pair made their narrative feature debut with Nyad, starring Annette Bening and Jodie Foster, both of whom received Academy Award nominations for their performances. Their other recent films include Wild Life (2023), a portrait of conservationists Kris and Doug Tompkins, The Rescue (2021), an Emmy-winning account of the Thai cave rescue, and Love+War (2025), on war photographer Lynsey Addario. Vasarhelyi has also been honored with a Peabody Award and a News & Documentary Emmy for her body of work. She and Chin are currently in post-production on a documentary about four Indigenous children who survived forty days alone in the Amazon jungle after a 2023 plane crash, and Everest: The Other Side, an intimate portrait of two people bound together by love, ambition, and the pursuit of the impossible on Everest, is set for release later in 2026. 

Vasarhelyi's earlier films as a director include Meru (Sundance Audience Award, 2015; Oscar shortlist, 2016), Incorruptible (Truer Than Fiction Independent Spirit Award, 2016), and Youssou N'Dour: I Bring What I Love (Oscilloscope, 2009). She has directed two New York Times Op-Docs, two episodes of Netflix's design series Abstract, and two episodes of ESPN's Enhanced. She has received grants from the Sundance Institute, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Bertha BritDoc, the William and Mary Greve Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is a member of the DGA and AMPAS.