Kathleen Collins

Kathleen Collins only managed to direct two films (she also wrote short stories and plays) but left an impact on the cinema as the second African American woman to direct a film, and as a teacher through her students. She had a strict upbringing in Jersey City as the daughter of an undertaker (who later became a school principal).Her college years at Skidmore in Saratoga Springs, New York brought her into the time of early 1960s activism when she wrote for the student paper, travelled to Georgia with SNCC where she was briefly arrested, and then abroad after graduation to Africa as part of the Crossroads program.There she met her future husband who she would reconnect with when she went to the Sorbonne in Paris to pursue her master's degree, that was also where she became more interested in film. In the 70s, back in New York, she got the film program going at City College and worked as an editor on Sesame Street and such. She died young, in her early 40s, of cancer, but her two features from the 1980s are being rediscovered by a new generation.