She directed episodes of the NBC series Homicide: Life on the Street (1998–1999), and won the Primetime Emmy Award for Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking for her work on the Netflix film Cartel Land (2015).

[9] 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,[10] as well as Andrew Sarris and Edward W. Said,[11] and she worked with the Art & Language collective and Lawrence Weiner.

[13] While working with Art & Language Bigelow published an article, "Not on the Development of Contradiction," in the short-lived Art & Language magazine The Fox, and began a short film, The Set-Up (1978), which found favor with director Miloš Forman,[14] then teaching at Columbia University, and which Bigelow later submitted as part of her MFA at Columbia.

Bigelow's subsequent films, Blue Steel, Point Break, and Strange Days, "merged her philosophically minded manipulation of pace with the market demands of mainstream film-making".

[15] Blue Steel starred Jamie Lee Curtis as a rookie police officer who is stalked by a psychopathic killer, played by Ron Silver.

The film, originally bankrolled for $10 million, was shot on location in New York due to financial considerations and because Bigelow does not "like movies where you see a welfare apartment and it's the size of two football fields.

"[18] Bigelow followed Blue Steel with the cult classic Point Break (1991), which starred Keanu Reeves as an FBI agent who poses as a surfer to catch the "Ex-Presidents", a team of surfing armed robbers led by Patrick Swayze who wear Reagan, Nixon, LBJ and Jimmy Carter masks when they hold up banks.

Critics argued that it conformed to some of the clichés and tired stereotypes of the action genre and that it abandoned much of the stylistic substance and subtext of Bigelow's other work.

Based on Anita Shreve's novel of the same name, Bigelow's 2000 film The Weight of Water is a portrait of two women trapped in suffocating relationships.

In 2002, she directed K-19: The Widowmaker, starring Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson, about a group of men aboard the Soviet Union's first nuclear-powered submarine.

Set in post-invasion Iraq, the film received "universal acclaim" (according to Metacritic)[20] and a 97% "fresh" rating from the critics aggregated by Rotten Tomatoes.

[21] The film stars Jeremy Renner, Brian Geraghty and Anthony Mackie, with cameos by Guy Pearce, David Morse and Ralph Fiennes.

[7] In her acceptance speech for her Academy Award, Bigelow surprised many audience members when she did not mention her status as the first woman to ever receive an Oscar for Best Director.

and by Marcia Froelke Coburn, who asked in the Chicago Tribune, "What's a nice woman like Bigelow doing making erotic, violent vampire movies?

John Boyega, Hannah Murray, Will Poulter, Jack Reynor, Anthony Mackie, and Joseph David-Jones starred in the film.

[33] In 2022, Bigelow was nominated by the Directors Guild of America for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Commercials for Apple's "Hollywood In Your Pocket".

[35] The currently untitled project is reported to be "centered on a group of White House officials scrambling to deal with an incoming missile attack".

Her work "both satisfies and transcends the demands of formula to create cinema that's ideologically complex, viscerally thrilling, and highly personal".

In her first short film The Set-Up (1978), two professors deconstruct two men beating each other up and reflect on the "fascistic appeal of screen violence".

[41] Although the film flopped, it led Bigelow and her team to spend over a year developing a camera that intended to approximate human vision.

The Hurt Locker, which follows members of a bomb squad serving in the Iraq War, was Bigelow's first venture into pseudo-documentary style film, abandoning the aesthetic stylization found in Strange Days and Near Dark.

Her next film, Zero Dark Thirty, is widely seen as a direct extension of The Hurt Locker, going further in-depth of historical analysis and addressing issues of geopolitics and American foreign policy.

[40] In November 1976, she appeared in a political 56-minute film, entitled "Struggle in New York" which involved conceptual artists Art & Language.

Her acting credits include Lizzie Borden's 1983 film Born in Flames as a feminist newspaper editor, and as the leader of a cowgirl gang in the 1988 music video of Martini Ranch's "Reach", which was directed by James Cameron.