[6][7][8] In 2011, she was honoured as a Member of the Order of the Federal Republic by the Nigerian government for her contributions to Nollywood.

[9] Her directorial debut movie, Lionheart, is the first Netflix film from Nigeria and the first Nigerian submission for the Oscars.

[10][11] After having spent decades in the movie industry, she was profiled alongside some celebrities and business executives in 2020 in two new books by the publisher and editor in chief of Yes International!

The fourth of eight children, she was raised in a middle-class family; her father worked as an engineer and her mother was a nursery school teacher.

[8] Nnaji started her acting career as a child actor in the then-popular television soap opera Ripples at the age of 8.

In January 2018, it was reported that Nnaji would be replacing Funke Akindele as a member of the Dora Milaje in Marvel's Avengers: Infinity War.

In a viral tweet on 4 November 2019, the award-winning filmmaker Ava DuVernay had questioned the Academy's decision on nixing Lionheart Oscar race for using its official language — English.

In an article published by culture writer and multiculturalism scholar- Kovie Biakolo titled "Nigeria's Lion Heart Disqualification is Bigger than the Oscars" on the CNN opinion website; Kovie opined that "one cannot help but feel that Nigeria is ultimately being penalised for being a former British colony in using the very language that was imposed on its people, to communicate between them, and especially for art.

And in truth, the Academy may be demonstrating a short-sighted or surface-level understanding of its purported inclusivity in this category".

[42] She went further to criticise the Oscar board for allowing the nominations of British movies that were not done in English, which invariably is the Country's main language but did so in the case of Nigeria whose cultural diversity could be confounding yet true.