Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi
American film director
Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi ( VAH-sə-REL-ee; born 1977 or 1978) is an American documentary filmmaker. She was the director, along with her then-husband, Jimmy Chin, for the film Free Solo, which won the 2019 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. The film profiled Alex Honnold and his free solo climb of El Capitan in June 2017. Vasarhelyi and Chin's first scripted film venture was Nyad, a biopic chronicling Diana Nyad's quest to be the first person to swim from Cuba to Florida.
Early life and education
Vasarhelyi grew up in New York City, and is the daughter of Marina Vasarhelyi, a college administrator, and Miklós Vásárhelyi, a college professor. Her father is a Hungarian-born Brazilian and her mother is from Hong Kong. Vasarhelyi is a graduate of The Brearley School. She holds a B.A. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University.
Career
Early career
Vasarhelyi's first film, A Normal Life, won Best Documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2003. She began working on it during her junior year in college, wanting to do something to help after the ethnic cleansing and war crimes of the Kosovo War.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5362559. VIAF identifies the subject as 121219525. The Library of Congress control number is no2010077852. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1977, 1978, 2019 and 2017.
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This entry incorporates text from “Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.