Kathryn Bigelow

Kathryn Bigelow has distinguished herself as one of Hollywood's most innovative filmmakers. Her most recent directorial achievement, THE HURT LOCKER, was released in June 2009 to box office success and was "the most critically acclaimed American film of the year," according to The New York Times.

Chronicling an unseen side of the war while revealing the soul-numbing rigors of the modern battlefield, Bigelow's film has been hailed by Time's Richard Corliss as "a near perfect movie," and deemed "a classic of fear, tension and bravery which will still be studied twenty years from now," by the New Yorker's David Denby. The New York Daily News deemed it "one of the defining films of the decade," and the Los Angeles Times added that it was "Bigelow's unqualified triumph."

THE HURT LOCKER was written by Mark Boal, produced by Bigelow and Boal, and was honored by critics on over 250 top ten lists. It garnered numerous additional accolades and awards, including Golden Globe nominations for Best Picture and Best Director, a Best Picture win from the Producer's Guild of America, and a Best Director win for Bigelow from the DGA. The film was nominated for 9 Academy Awards and won 7, including Best Director, Best Picture, and Best Screenplay.

In 1985, Bigelow directed and co-wrote the stirring cult classic NEAR DARK, produced by Steven- Charles Jaffe. The film was critically lauded as a "poetic horror film." As always, Bigelow's visual style garnered positive reactions from the press, who described it as "dreamy, passionate and terrifying, a hallucinatory vision of the American nightworld that becomes both seductive and devastating." Following the release of the film, the Museum of Modern Art honored Bigelow with a career retrospective.

In 1991, Bigelow directed the action thriller POINT BREAK, which starred Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze. Executive produced by James Cameron, POINT BREAK explored the dangerous extremes of a psychological struggle between two young men. The Chicago Tribune commended her astonishing filmmaking sensibilities and described her as "a uniquely talented, uniquely powerful filmmaker...Bigelow has tapped into something primal and strong. She is a sensualist in the most sensual of mediums."

When STRANGE DAYS was released in 1995, Roger Ebert called it a "technical tour de force." In the film, Bigelow explored the unsettling prospects of computer-generated virtual reality and the impending new millennium. STRANGE DAYS received rave reviews and was highly praised for its energy and unique, intense visuals. Janet Maslin, in The New York Times, stated that "the furiously talented" Bigelow was "operating at full throttle... using material ablaze with eerie promise... she turns STRANGE DAYS into a troubling but undeniably breathless joyride." Starring Ralph Fiennes, Angela Bassett and Juliette Lewis, Strange Days was co-written by James Cameron and released by Twentieth Century Fox.

Bigelow also directed THE WEIGHT OF WAR, starring Sean Penn, Sarah Polley, Catherine McCormack and Elizabeth Hurley. Based on the bestselling Anita Shreve novel, THE WEIGHT OF WAR made its world premiere in a gala screening at the 25th annual Toronto International Film Festival in 2000 and drew praise from critics and filmmakers alike. Variety described the film as being "Bigelow's richest, most ambitious and personal work to date; imbued with suspense, benefiting from Bigelow's penchant for creating a visual sense of menace and an atmosphere of fear."

On the release of K-19: THE WIDOWMAKER, The New York Times declared Bigelow "one of the most gifted...directors working in movies today." Starring Harrison Ford, Liam Neeson and Peter Saarsgard, it was one of the more critically well-received films of the summer of 2002. The film tells the true story of a heroic Soviet naval crew who risked their lives to prevent a near nuclear disaster aboard their submarine. Critics praised Bigelow as "an expert technician who never steps wrong" (Roger Ebert).

In 1972, Bigelow earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from the San Francisco Arts Institute. While enrolled at SFAI, she was accepted into the Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent Study scholarship in New York City. Bigelow then 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, Sylvere Lotringer and Susan Sontag, and she worked with the Art & Language Collective and noted conceptualist Lawrence Weiner. She has alto taught at the California Institute of the Arts.