Kathryn Bigelow

Bigelow was born in San Carlos, California, the only child of Gertrude Kathryn (née Larson; 1917–1994), a librarian, and Ronald Elliot Bigelow (1915–1992), a paint factory manager.

Her mother was of Norwegian descent.

She attended Sunny Hills High School in Fullerton, California.

Bigelow's early creative endeavors were as a student of painting.

Kathryn Ann Bigelow (born November 27, 1951) is an American filmmaker.

Bigelow has received numerous accolades including two Academy Awards, two BAFTA Awards, and a Primetime Emmy Award.

She enrolled at San Francisco Art Institute in the fall of 1970 and received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in December 1972.

While enrolled at SFAI, she was accepted into the Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent Study Program in New York City.

For a while, Bigelow lived as an impoverished artist, staying with painter Julian Schnabel in performance artist Vito Acconci's loft.

She had a minor role in Richard Serra's video Prisoner's Dilemma (1974).

Bigelow teamed up with Philip Glass on a real-estate venture in which they renovated distressed apartments downtown and sold them for a profit.

Bigelow entered the graduate film program at Columbia University, where she studied theory and criticism and earned her master's degree.

Her professors included Vito Acconci, Sylvère Lotringer, and Susan Sontag, as well as Andrew Sarris and Edward W. Said, and she worked with the Art & Language collective and Lawrence Weiner.

She also taught at the California Institute of the Arts.

While working with Art & Language Bigelow published an article, "Not on the Development of Contradiction," in the short-lived Art & Language magazine The Fox, and began a short film, The Set-Up (1978), which found favor with director Miloš Forman, then teaching at Columbia University, and which Bigelow later submitted as part of her MFA at Columbia.

Bigelow's short The Set-Up is a 20-minute deconstruction of violence in film.

The film portrays "two men fighting each other as the semioticians Sylvère Lotringer and Marshall Blonsky deconstruct the images in voice-over."

Bigelow asked her actors to actually beat and bludgeon each other throughout the film's all-night shoot.

Bigelow made her directorial film debut with the outlaw biker film The Loveless (1981).

Her first full-length feature was The Loveless (1981), a biker film that she co-directed with Monty Montgomery.

It featured Willem Dafoe in his first starring role.

She rose to prominence directing the thrillers Near Dark (1987), Blue Steel (1990), Point Break (1991), Strange Days (1995), and K-19: The Widowmaker (2002).

Next, she directed Near Dark (1987), which she co-scripted with Eric Red.

With this film, she began her lifelong fascination with manipulating movie conventions and genre.

The main cast included three actors who had appeared in the film Aliens.

In the same year, she directed a music video for the New Order song "Touched by the Hand of God"; the video is a spoof of glam metal imagery.

Bigelow's subsequent films, Blue Steel, Point Break, and Strange Days, "merged her philosophically minded manipulation of pace with the market demands of mainstream film-making".

Blue Steel starred Jamie Lee Curtis as a rookie police officer who is stalked by a psychopathic killer, played by Ron Silver.

As with Near Dark, Eric Red co-wrote the screenplay.

The film, originally bankrolled for $10 million, was shot on location in New York due to financial considerations and because Bigelow does not "like movies where you see a welfare apartment and it's the size of two football fields."

Bigelow followed Blue Steel with the cult classic Point Break (1991), which starred Keanu Reeves as an FBI agent who poses as a surfer to catch the "Ex-Presidents", a team of surfing armed robbers led by Patrick Swayze who wear Reagan, Nixon, LBJ and Jimmy Carter masks when they hold up banks.

Point Break was Bigelow's most profitable 'studio' film, taking approximately $80 million at the global box office during the year of its release, and yet it remains one of her lowest rated films, both in commercial reviews and academic analysis.

Critics argued that it conformed to some of the clichés and tired stereotypes of the action genre and that it abandoned much of the stylistic substance and subtext of Bigelow's other work.

In 1993, she directed an episode of the TV series Wild Palms and appeared in one episode as Mazie Woiwode (uncredited).

Bigelow's 1995 film Strange Days was written and produced by her ex-husband James Cameron.

She directed episodes of the NBC series Homicide: Life on the Street (1998–1999), and won the Primetime Emmy Award for Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking for her work on the Netflix film Cartel Land (2015).

She is known for her collaborations with Eric Red and Mark Boal.

For directing the war drama The Hurt Locker (2008), Bigelow became the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director.

Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2010.

She has since directed the spy thriller Zero Dark Thirty (2012), and the crime drama Detroit (2017).