Film
Kathryn Bigelow
Director, first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director
Born 1951
Photo: Bryan Berlin · CC BY-SA 4.0
Kathryn Bigelow trained as a painter before turning to film, and in 2010 became the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director, for The Hurt Locker. She works mostly in tense, physical, documentary-influenced action films.
Key achievements
- First woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director, 2010
- Directed The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty
- Trained first as a painter before turning to film
Universities
New York, Manhattan
Took a master's degree in film at Columbia's School of the Arts in 1981 on a scholarship.
Facts
- She studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute and was mentored in New York by artists including Susan Sontag and Richard Serra.
- The Hurt Locker beat Avatar, directed by her former husband James Cameron, for Best Picture the same night.
- She shot The Hurt Locker in Jordan, within a few kilometres of the Iraqi border, in temperatures above 40 degrees.
Photographs
Photographs come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences; the author and licence are shown on each image.