Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy

• 1. Introduction

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  Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy was seventeen years old and already filing investigative reports for a local English-language newspaper in Karachi. That was not a plan she had mapped out. Her mother, a social worker named Saba Obaid, had simply told her to write down the questions she kept asking about the world. What began as an exercise in curiosity became a career that would eventually carry her to the Academy Awards stage twice, to the World Economic Forum as its first-ever artist co-chair, and into the Marvel Studios universe as the first Pakistani director to work with the company.

  How did a girl who, by her own account, was not inclined toward academics turn into one of the most decorated documentary filmmakers alive? What subjects kept pulling her back to the camera? And what happened when her films stopped merely describing injustice and started changing laws?

• 2. Karachi to the Oscars

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  Smith College in Massachusetts was where Obaid-Chinoy completed her bachelor's degree in Economics and Government in 2002. She did not linger long in the classroom after that. The same year she graduated, she returned to Pakistan and made her first film, Terror's Children, for The New York Times. It focused on Afghan refugee children living in Karachi.

  Two more award-winning films followed while she was still a graduate student at Stanford University in 2003 and 2004. Stanford also granted her two master's degrees, in Communication and in International Policy Studies. Her association with the PBS series Frontline World began in 2004 with a report called "On a Razor's Edge," and over the next five years she produced broadcast reports, online videos, and written dispatches from Pakistan.

  The film Saving Face brought her first Oscar, specifically the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Film in 2012. That win made her the first Pakistani to receive an Academy Award and placed her among only eleven female directors ever to win an Oscar in a non-fiction category. Four years later, at the 88th Academy Awards on the 28th of February 2016, A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness gave her a second. Winning two Oscars before the age of 37 made her the first female film director to hold that record.

• 3. Films That Changed Laws

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  A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness was not simply a film that won awards. On the 22nd of February 2016, the documentary had its first Pakistani screening at the Prime Minister's Secretariat in Islamabad, opened with remarks by Obaid-Chinoy and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. The screening was framed explicitly around the legal changes needed to close loopholes that allowed perpetrators of so-called honour killings to avoid prosecution.

  Obaid-Chinoy had already met directly with Sharif on the 15th of February 2016 to discuss exactly those loopholes. Three days before that meeting, the film screened at United Nations Headquarters in New York City as part of a discussion on women and peacekeeping. Her work highlighting the legal gaps around honour killing was cited when Pakistan subsequently amended its laws on the practice.

  In November 2017, the International Center for Journalists awarded her the Knight International Journalism Award in Washington, DC. ICFJ President Joyce Barnathan said of Obaid-Chinoy and her collaborator: "At great personal risk, Obaid-Chinoy and al Masri faced terrorism head on, getting behind the scenes to chronicle untold abuses." The same year, A Girl in the River also received an International Emmy Award for Best Documentary.

• 4. Animation and the Next Generation

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  On the 22nd of May 2015, Pakistan's first computer-animated feature film was released by Waadi Animations, the production company Obaid-Chinoy was behind. The film was 3 Bahadur, directed by her and dedicated, in her framing, to instilling bravery in Pakistan's youth. It screened on only 50 screens in the country yet earned Rs 6.5 million, surpassing even the record set by Rio 2 to become Pakistan's highest grossing animated film of all time. It also screened at the Montreal World Film Festival in August 2015.

  Four years later, in September 2019, Obaid-Chinoy unveiled Sitara: Let Girls Dream in New York theaters. The animated short was produced entirely in Pakistan under Waadi Animations, in association with Vice Studios and Gucci's Chime For Change initiative. The animated Stories for Children series, which she also produced, examines the relationships between local Pakistani heroes and their parents.

  Through animation, Obaid-Chinoy found a way to reach audiences her documentary films might not touch: children and families who had never engaged with human rights journalism. The Rs 6.5 million earned by 3 Bahadur on just 50 screens hinted at how large that audience could grow if the films were given wider distribution.

• 5. Archiving Memory, Building Institutions

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  In 2007, Obaid-Chinoy helped found the Citizens Archive of Pakistan, an organisation whose work centres on preserving the country's cultural and social heritage. The same instinct that drove that project emerged again a decade later in an immersive art exhibition called HOME1947.

  HOME1947 was inaugurated at the Manchester International Festival from 1 to the 9th of July 2017. It then travelled to Mumbai in August, where it became part of the Museum of Memories at the Godrej India Culture Lab. The Pakistan premiere took place in October 2017 at the Heritage Now festival in Lahore, and the work transferred to Karachi in December 2017. Its North American debut came in February 2022 at Oklahoma Contemporary. Two films Obaid-Chinoy contributed to that exhibition examine the human impact of the Partition of India in 1947.

  In September 2022, her production company Patakha Pictures launched a program called Pakistan Stories in collaboration with the Scottish Documentary Institute and the British Council. The initiative paired ten female Pakistani documentary filmmakers to produce five short films over twelve weeks, using the milestone of Pakistan's 75th anniversary as its premise. Separately, in February 2023, she introduced the Neela Asmaan international art residency, offering emerging and established artists time to work in the Shigar Valley of Gilgit-Baltistan.

• 6. Global Platforms and New Frontiers

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  In January 2017, Obaid-Chinoy co-chaired the 47th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum at Davos, becoming the first artist ever given that role. In her own words at the time: "I have always believed that the true mark of any thriving society is the amount of investment made in its cultural and artistic infrastructure."

  The announcement that she would co-direct the Disney+ series Ms. Marvel came in September 2020. She directed two episodes, making her the first Pakistani director to work with Marvel Studios on bringing the company's first Muslim hero to a screen. In October 2022, it was reported she would direct an untitled film set in the Star Wars universe, written by Steven Knight from an earlier draft by Damon Lindelof and Justin Britt-Gibson. Disney confirmed the project in April 2023 at Star Wars Celebration, with Daisy Ridley returning as Rey and the story set fifteen years after The Rise of Skywalker. The film had been originally scheduled for the 17th of December 2027 before being removed from the release calendar in May 2025.

  In April 2023, Obaid-Chinoy and co-director Trish Dalton completed Diane von Fürstenberg: Woman in Charge for Hulu. The documentary features interviews with Hillary Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, Barry Diller, Anderson Cooper, and Marc Jacobs, alongside archival footage and the story of von Fürstenberg's mother as a Holocaust survivor. The film won the Cinema for Peace Dove for Women's Empowerment in 2025, adding to the seven Emmy Awards and two Academy Awards that define a body of work still in motion.