Kathryn Bigelow

Kathryn Bigelow is an American director, actress, and producer born on November 28, 1951, in San Carlos, California. She graduated with a Bachelor in Fine Arts from San Franciso Art Institute. In the 1970s, she received a scholarship when she was 20 and relocated to New York City to take part in the independent study program at the Whitney Museum. She was given a workspace in a disused Offtrack Betting building, which was essentially a disused bank vault, where she created art. At the same time, she awaited feedback from individuals like Susan Sontag, Robert Rauschenberg, and Richard Serra. She later received a scholarship and graduated in 1979 from Columbia University School of Arts where she studied film.

She belonged to the British avant-garde arts collective Art and Language. She quickly developed a passion for filmmaking and finally won a scholarship to attend Columbia University's graduate program in film. She created the short film The Set-Up there in 1978. The Loveless, which Bigelow co-wrote and co-directed with Monty Montgomery, was the first feature-length film she produced after earning her degree from Columbia in 1979. The Willem Dafoe-led movie from 1982 was about a motorcycle gang's visit to a small Southern town and the resulting mayhem. After that, Bigelow received a number of scripts, the majority of which were high school comedies. She declined the offers and, in 1983, she started working as a teacher at the California Institute of the Arts. In 1987, Bigelow made a comeback to the big screen with the vampire movie Near Dark, which went on to become a cult favorite.

Kathryn’s box office success with her co-written and directed action movie Blue Steel 1989 cemented her place in the genre, which has always been controlled by men. She produced a stunning drama with the science fiction film Strange Days in 1995, which features futuristic technology that allows thoughts and memories to be transmitted from one person to another. In 2008, she directed the drama The Hurt Locker Click to look into! >> Read More... about the Iraq War. The low-budget movie ended up winning the director an Oscar. Five other Academy Awards were given to the film, including best picture. Some other movies directed by her include Zero Dark Thirty, Point Freak, The Loveless, Detroit, The Weight of Water, Strange Days, and Near Dark. Kathryn is a commercial director as well.

She has directed advertisements for the Army National Guard, Budweiser, and AT&T, some of which were aired during the Super Bowl, and is distributed globally by advertising production house SMUGGLER. For Apple's Hollywood In Your Pocket, she was nominated by the Directors Guild of America in 2022 for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Commercials. Kathryn’s experiences as an actress include her acting as the model for a Gap campaign at the start of the 1980s. She starred as a feminist newspaper editor in Lizzie Borden's 1983 film Born in Flames and as the boss of a cowgirl gang in James Cameron's 1988 music video for Martini Ranch's Reach. She is the first woman to receive the Best Director Oscar, the Outstanding Directing Award from the Directors Guild of America, and the Best Direction BAFTA for The Hurt Locker. For the 1995 movie Strange Days, Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to receive the Saturn Award for Best Director. She was also included in the 2010 Time 100 list of the most influential persons in the world.