Zhou Dongyu was born into an ordinary family in Shijiazhuang City, Hebei Province in early 1992. In 2010, Zhang Yimou chose Zhou from more than 8,000 actresses to star in Under the Hauthorn Tree, and she soon became known to the people of her hometown after winning Best Actress at the 56th Valladolid International Film Festival in Spain, the Outstanding New Actress Award at the 14th China Huabiao Awards and Best New Performer at the 20th Shanghai Film Critics Association Awards for her role in Under the Hauthorn Tree.

The luck of the young actress continued from there. In 2011, she was admitted to the Beijing Film Academy (BFA), China's most respected film school.

In the three years there, Zhou received a number of film offers and starred in several, but the characters always seemed the same. "I'm always that innocent girl—the first-love type," she once lamented. She felt the need to break out of the pigeonhole(禁锢). In 2013, Zhou auditioned(试演) for a small role in Breakup Buddies. "Actually, the director turned me down at first. But days later, he called me in for an audition. ‘I have to land this role' was all I could think on the way to the audition. It was the perfect opportunity to change my image." During her audition, Zhou was asked to do some name-calling. Two days later, she was told that she had been cast as a rural hairdresser, turning her previous lovable, innocent image upside down and resulting in the most memorable female character in the film.

After Breakup Buddies, Zhou began to receive a wider variety of offers, and she ended up playing an ill-tempered genius in The Ark of Mr. Chow and an agent in the TV drama Sparrow. "I still need to further improve my skills by playing different characters," says Zhou. "By doing this, I get a deeper understanding of a wider variety of people I might not have otherwise ever known."