Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy is a Pakistani-born Canadian journalist, filmmaker and activist known for her work in films that highlight the inequality with women. She is the recipient of two Academy Awards, seven Emmy Awards and a Knight International Journalism Award. In 2012, the Government of Pakistan honoured her with the Hilal-i-Imtiaz, the second highest civilian honour of the country and the same year Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world. She holds the record for being the first female film director to have won two Academy Awards by the age of 37.
Obaid-Chinoy was born in Karachi in 1978. She received her bachelor's degree in economics and government from Smith College and went on to earn two master's degrees from Stanford University. She returned to Pakistan and launched her career as a filmmaker with her first film Terror's Children for The New York Times. In 2003 and 2004 she made two award-winning films while at Stanford. Her most notable films includes, the animated adventure 3 Bahadur (2015), the musical journey Song of Lahore (2015) and the two Academy Award-winning films, the documentary Saving Face (2012) and the biographical A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness (2016). Her visual contributions have earned her numerous awards, including two Academy Awards for Best Short Subject in 2012 and 2016 and two Emmy Awards in the same category in 2010 and 2011.
Obaid-Chinoy has also won six Emmy Awards, including two of which are in the International Emmy Award for Current Affairs Documentary category for the films, the terrorist drama Pakistan's Taliban Generation and the documentary Saving Face (2012). Throughout her career, she has made many records; her Academy Award win for Saving Face made her the first Pakistani to win an Academy Award, and she is one of only eleven female directors who have ever won an Oscar for a non-fiction film. She is also the first non-American to win the Livingston Award for Young Journalists. The 2015 animated adventure 3 Bahadur made her the first Pakistani to make a computer-animated feature-length film. In 2017, Obaid-Chinoy became the first artist to co-chair the World Economic Forum.
In September 2020, it was announced that Obaid-Chinoy would be co-directing the Ms. Marvel series with Adil El Arbi, Bilall Fallah and Meera Menon for Disney+ to bring Marvel Studios' first Muslim hero to the big screen. The opportunity makes her the first Pakistani director to be involved with Marvel.
