Kathryn Bigelow Biography
Born: November 27, 1951
Director Kathryn Bigelow's small but impressive body of work has consistently dealt with issues of violence and tension. Originally trained as a painter, she attended the San Francisco Art Institute and was invited to study at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. She worked as an assistant to the conceptual artist Vito_Acconci and later joined a British collective called Art and Language. She did graduate work at Colombia, where she made her first short film, The Set-Up, a deconstruction of film violence, and Bigelow returned to this central theme throughout her unique career in the action genre. Her first feature, The_Loveless, was a biker gang movie featuring the acting debut of Willem_Dafoe. Teaming up with her frequent writing partner Eric_Red, she made the vampire-Western Near_Dark and the crime drama Blue_Steel. After the mild success of Point_Break, she gained some attention in 1995 for Strange_Days, which she based on a story by her then-husband, Titanic-director James_Cameron. After a brief stint in television (Wild_Palms, Homicide: Life on the Street), she took a five-year break from Hollywood, not returning until 2000 to direct The Weight of Water and K-19:_The_Widowmaker (2002).
After a six-year layoff, Bigelow returned with the Iraq War thriller/character study The Hurt Locker, a project that earned her the most overwhelmingly positive notices of her career, as well as an unprecedented win from the Directors Guild for Best Director -- becoming the first woman to ever capture that prize. She also received nominations from The Golden Globes and the Academy. Andrea LeVasseur, Rovi
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