Filmmaker Kathryn Ann Bigelow was named by Time magazine as one of the most influential people of 2010 for her work on the Academy Award Best Director and Best Picture winning war film, The Hurt Locker.

Born in 1951, Bigelow joined the graduate film program at Columbia University in the 1970s, studying art theory and criticism that influenced her early film shorts. The “Set Up”, a short 20 minute deconstruction of violence on film, shows two protagonists beating each other while semioticians deconstruct their cultural cues. Bigelow’s first feature film was Loveless (1982) a biker film in which she co-directed.

Her big break came with a series of action films in the early 1990s that managed to balance genre narrative action with social criticism and intellectual politics. Blue Steel (1990) starred Jamie Lee Curtis as a rookie police officer being stalked, Point Break (1991) with Keanu Reeves and the sci-fi epic Strange Days (1995), which was written and produced by her ex-husband, James Cameron.

The Hurt Locker (2009) commented on the war in Iraq and was released to widespread commercial and critical acclaim. She won the Directors Guild of America award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures (becoming the first woman to win the award) and also received a Golden Globe nomination for her direction. In 2010, she won the award for Best Director and The Hurt Locker won Best Picture at the 63rd British Academy Film Awards.[19] She became the first woman to receive an Academy Award for Best Director for The Hurt Locker.[20] She was the fourth woman in history to be nominated for the honor, and only the second American woman.

Zero Dark Thirty, her next film, was even more controversial, dramatizing the American efforts to hunt down Osama bin Laden.

FILMOGRAPHY

2012 Zero Dark Thirty

2008 The Hurt Locker

2007 Mission Zero (Short)

2002 K-19: The Widowmaker

2000 The Weight of Water

1995 Strange Days

1991 Point Break

1989 Blue Steel

1987 Near Dark

1981 The Loveless

1978 The Set-Up (Short)