Patricia Cardoso is a Colombian-American filmmaker and anthropologist who was the first Latinx woman director to have a film included in the Library of Congress's National Film Registry and to receive a Sundance Audience Award. Her directing credits include the pilot for Amazon's Harlan Coben's Shelter, recently ordered to series and to be released in 2023. Her first feature film, Real Women Have Curves, was a box office and critical success and became a landmark of American independent film. Cardoso is a graduate of UCLA's film school and a Fulbright scholar; her anthropological approach to directing guides her film and television work. Cardoso was the first Latinx woman director to receive a Student Academy Award. Her episodic directing work includes Netflix's The Society and Tales of the City, All Rise, Emergence, Party of Five, and Diary of a Future President. In 2021 Cardoso was invited to join the British Film Academy. In 2019, her film Real Women Have Curves was selected by the Library of Congress for inclusion in the National Film Registry "as a cinematic treasure and worthy of preservation as part of America's patrimony". In 2018, Ava DuVernay tapped her to direct an episode of her acclaimed television series Queen Sugar. In 2017, Cardoso was invited to join the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences in the Directors Branch. Early life Cardoso was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. As a child she wrote and illustrated home-made picture-books. Only when she became a film student at UCLA she realized these books were story boards. Cardoso's first film was a humorous documentary titled Vacas Flacas y Vacas Gordas (Skinny Cows and Fat Cows) about the famine and feast periods her family endured. Due to the lack of technology in her household the film was made with toothpicks, paper, and cardboard. She studied anthropology at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. Career At UCLA film school she was at the top of her class earning all major directing awards at the school: the Colin Higgins Foundation Award in Film, the Lynn Weston Fellowship in Film, and the Verna Fields Award. Cardoso's directing credits include episodes of The Society, All Rise, and Tales of the City and the feature Teresa —the largest box office for a woman director in Colombia. Cardoso was the first Latinx woman to win a Sundance Film Festival Dramatic Audience Award and to receive a