Self-assembly of nanoscale building blocks into long-range three-dimensional structures is key to the development of nanostructured materials with pre-engineered optical, thermal and mechanical properties. Soft matter, such as liquid crystal (LC), exhibits long range ordering and features facile response to weak stimuli (e.g. voltage, light), making them excellent candidates for preparing self-assembled responsive nanomaterials. In this talk, I will first introduce long-range ordered LC/plasmonic nanoparticle systems with facile response to low-voltage fields and low-intensity light. enabling a new generation of smart windows and optical metamaterials. Next, I will discuss liquid crystalline self-assembly of biological building blocks such as cellulose nanofibers into ordered aerogels and photonic films. This scalable nanocellulose platform allows economic fabrication of innovative photonic materials from the bottom-up, enabling technologies such as energy-saving retrofittable window films and biomimetic flexible optoelectronic devices. Finally, I will discuss the novel physics energing from LCs embedded with micro- and nano-building blocks, where fluidity, topology, and properties such as ferromagnetism intersect. Understanding the fundamental physics underlying these systems gives us insight into these new types of self-assembly.