
Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi
Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi is an award-winning film director and producer with Hungarian, Chinese and Brazilian roots. Vasarhelyi directed Meru (Mountainfilm 2015), a documentary about the never-before-climbed Shark’s Fin on Mount Meru, with her husband and co-cinematographer Jimmy Chin. Her first film, A Normal Life, about young Kosovars who came of age during the recent war, won Best Documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2003. Her second film, Youssou N’Dour: I Bring What I Love, chronicles Senegalese icon Youssou N’Dour and his Grammy Award-winning album Egypt and won numerous awards, including the Special Jury Prize at the Middle East International Film Festival in 2008 and a nomination for the Pare Lorentz Award at the 2009 International Documentary Association Awards. Vasarhelyi holds a bachelor’s degree in comparative literature from Princeton University.