Director Kathryn Bigelow's small but impressive body of work has consistently dealt with issues of violence and tension. Originally trained as a painter, she attended the San Francisco Art Institute and was invited to study at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. She worked as an assistant to the conceptual artist Vito Acconci and later joined a British collective called Art and Language. She did graduate work at Colombia, where she made her first short film, The Set-Up, a deconstruction of film violence, and Bigelow returned to this central theme throughout her unique career in the action genre. Her first feature, The Loveless, was a biker gang movie featuring the acting debut of Willem Dafoe. Teaming up with her frequent writing partner Eric Red, she made the vampire-Western Near Dark and the crime drama Blue Steel. After the mild success of Point Break, she gained some attention in 1995 for Strange Days, which she based on a story by her then-husband, Titanic-director James Cameron. After a brief stint in television (Wild Palms, Homicide: Life on the Street), she took a five-year break from Hollywood, not returning until 2000 to direct The Weight of Water and K-19: The Widowmaker (2002).