Rao was recently named Vimeo Breakout Creator of the Year 2025 and is a Gotham-nominated feature filmmaker, and award-winning short film Writer and Director, with premieres at Sundance, Berlinale, Telluride, The Museum of Modern Art, Tribeca, SXSW and more. On scholarship, Rao recently completed her MFA in Screenwriting and Directing, at NYU Grad Film.
Her award-winning Oscar-qualified short fiction film as Writer-Director, THE TRUCK, is a Vimeo Staff Pick Premiere, and Director’s Notes Premiere, with an audience of nearly 200k and counting.
The Truck” World-Premiered at Telluride, screened at MoMA, won the Grand Jury Prize at the Oscar-qualifying Florida Film Festival, won Best Screenplay at Flickers’ Rhode Island International Film Festival, screening in more than 50 festivals and counting, worldwide. Liz Rao is a Hear Us Awardee and Ouray Film Sabbatical Inaugural Fellow developing her debut feature, a thematic cousin to “The Truck”.
Her work is supported by top awards from The Future of Film is Female, Fusion Film Award, NYU Kings Award, the Clive Davis Award, the Yunni & Maxine Pao Memorial Scholarship, the Willard T.C. Johnson Fellowship, and the Jonathan Laxamana Emerging Filmmaker Award. Rao has given artist talks at Yale University, Mount Holyoke College, The Gotham Fiction Feature Lab, The Edit Center, UnionDocs, and has taught workshops at True/False Film Festival. Rao is a proud member of A-Doc and Brown Girls Doc Mafia.
