Kathryn Bigelow
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. Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2010. Bigelow made her directorial film debut with the outlaw biker film The Loveless (1981). 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). For directing the war drama The Hurt Locker (2008), Bigelow became the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director. She has since directed the spy thriller Zero Dark Thirty (2012), and the crime drama Detroit (2017). 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. Early life and education 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. 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. Directing career 1981–2002: Directorial debut and breakthrough 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. Her first full-length