Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy

Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy is a Pakistani-Canadian journalist and documentary filmmaker, born in Karachi on 12 November 1978, known for films that highlight the inequality faced by women. ^{1 2}

She won two Academy Awards for Best Documentary Short Subject, for Saving Face in 2012 and A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness in 2016, and seven Emmy Awards, making her the first Pakistani to win an Academy Award and the first female director to win two Academy Awards by the age of 37. ¹

On 23 March 2012 the Government of Pakistan conferred on her the Hilal-i-Imtiaz, the country's second-highest civilian honour, and TIME named her that year among the 100 most influential people in the world. ^{1 2}

She was born in Karachi. The English article describes her as a Gujarati Muslim; her mother Saba Obaid is a social worker, her father Sheikh Obaid was a businessman, and she has four younger sisters and a younger brother. ¹

She attended the Convent of Jesus and Mary and then Karachi Grammar School. She asked many questions about the world, her mother suggested she put them in writing, and by the age of 17 she was doing investigative reporting for a local English-language newspaper. ¹

She moved to the United States, completed a bachelor's degree in economics and government at Smith College in 2002, and took two master's degrees at Stanford University, in communication and in international policy studies. ^{1 2}

After her education she moved to Toronto with her husband Fahd Chinoy, and as of 2015 divided her time between Karachi and Toronto; she had become a Canadian citizen in 2004. ¹

She returned to Pakistan in 2002 and launched her filmmaking career with her first film, Terror's Children, for The New York Times; in 2003 and 2004 she made two award-winning films while a graduate student at Stanford. ¹

She then began a long association with the PBS series Frontline World, producing broadcast reports, online videos and written dispatches from Pakistan over five years. ¹

Her notable films include Children of the Taliban, The Lost Generation, Afghanistan Unveiled, and Pakistan's Taliban Generation, which won the Emmy for Best Documentary for its war-on-terror subject in 2009, as the article reports it. ¹

Her films have been aired on PBS, CNN, the Discovery Channel, Al Jazeera English and Channel 4. ¹

• Saving Face (2012), on survivors of acid attacks in Pakistan, which won the Academy Award and Emmy Awards. ¹
• A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness (2016), on so-called honour killings in Pakistan, which won her second Academy Award and an International Emmy for Best Documentary in 2017. ¹
• Song of Lahore (2015), a musical journey co-directed with Andy Schocken, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. ¹
• The 3 Bahadur series (2015–2018), Pakistan's first computer-animated feature-length film, which she directed and which became the country's highest-grossing animated film at its release. ¹
• A Journey of a Thousand Miles: Peacekeepers (2015), co-directed with Geeta Gandbhir, following three Bangladeshi women soldiers on a UN peacekeeping mission in Haiti. ¹
• Sitara: Let Girls Dream (2019), an animated short produced entirely in Pakistan. ¹
• She co-directed episodes of the Disney+ series Ms. Marvel, making her, as the article reports, the first Pakistani director to work with Marvel Studios. ¹

In 2007 she helped found the Citizens Archive of Pakistan, whose projects centre on preserving Pakistan's cultural and social heritage. She also serves as ambassador for blood safety for Pakistan's national blood safety programme, and is a TED Fellow. ¹

In 2018 the Aagahi series was launched, educating women about their rights and how to navigate the police and judicial system. ¹

This section sets out positions as reported in the sources; it is not a verdict by the museum. ¹

Her second Oscar-winning work was linked to legislative change: after A Girl in the River was screened at the Prime Minister's Secretariat in Islamabad in February 2016, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif said he would change the law on honour killing, a point Obaid-Chinoy herself made in her acceptance speech as an example of the power of film. ¹

In January 2017 she became the first artist to co-chair the World Economic Forum's annual meeting at Davos. ¹

She is married to Fahd Kamal Chinoy and has two children; this museum publishes no family detail beyond what understanding her work requires. ^{1 2}

The sources report that she has made films in more than ten countries, and that she is the first non-American to win the Livingston Award for Young Journalists, for Reinventing the Taliban in 2003. ¹

In 2017 she received the Knight International Journalism Award from the International Center for Journalists, recognising work that led to legislative change on honour killing. ¹

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• No Wikidata entity is registered for her in this batch because her QID could not be verified from this machine; adding it is documented follow-up work.