The first and only woman to win an Academy Award for Best Director, Kathryn Bigelow's command of visual narrative, her tenacity and her choice of subjects that have the ability to provoke change, have redefined the landscape of cinema today. The American director also acts as producer and writer for many of her films.

Bigelow co-wrote and directed her first feature film The Loveless in 1981, and in the 1990s directed a trilogy of action films, Blue Steel (1989), Point Break (1991) and Strange Days (1995), in which she challenged the conventions of action cinema. Her subsequent films solidi ed her position as a Hollywood heavyweight with the political action-thrillers, The Hurt Locker in 2008 and Zero Dark Thirty in 2012; for The Hurt Locker, Bigelow won Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director. With her most recent film, Detroit, Bigelow directed and produced a film, based on the 1967 Detroit riots, concerning race-related violence in the United States. Her films provoke an examination of the politics that surrounds us, and have established the director as a true auteur.

Bigelow regards film as a journalistic experience: "If the purpose of art is to agitate for change then  lm should expose us to something we don’t already know." Of appearing with the other three directors in the Rolex film, Bigelow said she felt "extremely humbled and honoured to be in the company of such extraordinary and enduring talents".