Early Life and Education
Bigelow was born in San Carlos, California, the only child of Gertude Kathryn (née Larson; 1917-1994), a librarian, and Ronald Elliot Bigelow (1915-1992), a paint factory manager. Her mother was of Norwegian descent. Bigelow's early creative endeavors were as a student of painting. She enrolled at San Francisco Art Institute in the fall of 1970 and received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in December 1972. While enrolled at SFAI, she was accepted into the Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent Study scholarship program in New York City. Bigelow’s early work benefited from her apprenticeships with Vito Acconi, Richard Serra, and Lawrence Weiner.
Bigelow 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, Sylvère Lotringer and Susan Sontag, and she worked with the Art & Language collective and noted conceptualist Lawrence Weiner. She also taught at the California Institute of the Arts. While working with Art and Language, Bigelow began a short film, The Set-Up (1978), which she submitted as part of her MFA at Columbia University.
Read more about this topic: Kathryn Bigelow
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