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.