The tall (5'11"), statuesque and strikingly beautiful Bigelow once modeled for a Gap ad and acted in Lizzie Borden's ironically militant feminist fantasy "Born in Flames" (1983). What's more, by peppering her interviews with allusions to post-structuralist theoreticians and other high-brow sorts, she has cultivated a reputation as an intellectual while charming journalists with her learned takes on her own work. All these factors have conspired to give Bigelow more status in the industry that one might expect for an artist with a relatively modest body of work.

The only child of a paint store manager and a librarian, Bigelow began her creative life as a painter in her teens. She took up formal studies at the San Francisco Art Institute for two years before winning a prestigious scholarship to the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 1971. Moving to NYC, the 19-year-old was set up with a studio in a former off-track betting office. Her paintings and conceptual art pieces were critiqued by the likes of Richard Serra, Robert Rauschenberg and Susan Sontag. The Whitney displayed one of her works in which viewers listened to a recording of pipes clanging together while all they saw was a still arrangement of chrome pipes on the floor. The piece was intended to illustrate "potentiality".

Bigelow ventured further into the realm of the avant-garde as the assistant of conceptual artist Vito Acconci. Among her duties was filming slogans to run behind the artist's performance pieces. Bigelow entered the graduate film program at Columbia University but focused on theory and criticism rather than production. Nonetheless she gained some attention with her first short, "Set-Up" (1978), a 20-minute piece in which two men fight while, on the soundtrack, someone reads an essay on violence. Bigelow segued into feature filmmaking as the co-writer-director (with Monty Montgomery) of "The Loveless", an outrageously mannered meditation on 1950s juvenile delinquent movies. (The film also marked the feature acting debut of Willem Dafoe.) This eccentric art movie generally bored or baffled the few who saw it but deeply impressed producer-writer-director Walter Hill who gave Bigelow a development deal when she moved to Los Angeles.

Bigelow became a cult figure with the 1987 release of "Near Dark", a stylish, atmospheric tale of modern-day vampires on the Great Plains which even prompted New York's Museum of Modern Art to mount a "retrospective" of her brief career. "Blue Steel" provided a strong vehicle for Jamie Lee Curtis and the wild and woolly "Point Break" first introduced Keanu Reeves as an action star. "Strange Days" won some rapturous reviews and a screening at the 1995 New York Film Festival. The film, however, quickly fizzled at the box office.

While she was absent from the big screen for five years. Bigelow was hardly idle. Since 1992, she had been developing a feature about the life of Joan of Arc and at one time Luc Besson was involved. When Besson went on to make his version of the story (1999's "The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc"), she cried foul and filed a lawsuit alleging fraud, breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duty. Rather than face a protracted legal battle, Besson settled out of court. Additionally during her absence from the big screen, Bigelow saw her script for the thriller "Undertow" produced and aired on Showtime in 1996 and she also helmed three episodes of the critically acclaimed NBC drama "Homicide: Life on the Street", the two-part season finale in 1998 and one of the series' final episodes in 1999. The following year, she was back at the multiplexes with "The Weight of Water", a psychological thriller that VARIETY (September 12, 2000) called "her richest, most ambitious and personal work to date". A drama that interwove two separate stories--the breakup of a contemporary marriage and a 19th-century murder--"The Weight of Water" was a visual stunning, well-acted film anchored by the superlative performances of its female leads.

Bigelow's next project was directing Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson in 2002's "K-19: The Widowmaker." Her direction of the movie was well recieved, though the film itself was not a huge box office or critical success.