233. How Menstrual Cycle Awareness has Shaped my Creative Process (Chloé Zhao) Artwork

The Menstruality Podcast

How can menstrual cycle awareness and conscious menopause enhance your health, creativity and leadership? That's the question we'll explore together in the Menstruality Podcast, brought to you by Red School, where we’re training the menstruality leaders of the future. Your host, Sophie Jane Hardy will be joined often by Red School’s founders, Alexandra Pope and Sjanie Hugo Wurlitzer, as well as pioneering thought leaders, troublemakers and culture-shifters to discover how you can unashamedly claim the power of the menstrual cycle to activate your unique form of leadership; for yourself, your community, and the world.

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The Menstruality Podcast

233. How Menstrual Cycle Awareness has Shaped my Creative Process (Chloé Zhao)

April 09, 2026 • Red School • Season 17 • Episode 233

0:00 | 1:05:04

Today it’s our great pleasure to be joined by Chloé Zhao. Chloé is an academy award winning filmmaker, and amongst many accolades, Chloé is the first Woman of Colour to have won an academy award for best director for her film Nomadland.

In this conversation, Chloé chats with Alexandra and Sjanie about how menstrual cycle awareness has shaped her creative process, including how she worked with the wisdom of her menstrual cycle to create and direct her most recent film, Hamnet, which received eight Oscar nominations.

When Chloé turned thirty seven years old, she started to get menstrual cramps for the first time. Although it wasn’t comfortable, she felt something important was coming to life within her. This coincided with what she lovingly calls a ‘midlife crisis’ that ultimately led her to discover the practice of menstrual cycle awareness, which she says helped her to learn a language that her body had forgotten to speak.

We explore:

Intuition as our greatest currency, and how becoming more aware of our menstrual cycles prepares the body to be a vessel to receive deep intuitive knowing.
The cyclical advice that Chloe has for all young filmmakers about the importance of wintering, and the power of seemingly non-productive work of rest, tending to your inner soil, and composting (even in the middle of a film set!).
How the premenstrual and menstrual phases of the cycle have taught Chloe to embody creative death and rebirth, and how this played out in the creation of Hamnet.

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