Kathleen Collins

Kathleen Conwell Collins was born on March 18, 1942, in Jersey City, New Jersey. She was the daughter of Frank Conwell, a mortician who became a school principal and made history as New Jersey's first African American state legislator. Raised in this striving, public-spirited household, Kathleen grew into a rare polymath — poet, playwright, editor, educator, and filmmaker.

She graduated from Skidmore College in 1963 with a degree in philosophy and religion, having spent her college years as a young activist with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the Civil Rights Movement. She later studied French literature and cinema at the Sorbonne in Paris, then built her craft as a film editor at public television, earning her union card before turning to her own work as a writer and director.

Collins wrote plays and directed two feature films, The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy (1980) and Losing Ground (1982). Losing Ground — a luminous story of a philosophy professor and her painter husband — stands among the very first narrative features directed by a Black American woman, an achievement shared with pioneers such as Jessie Maple. It won First Prize at the Figueroa International Film Festival in Portugal, though it went without theatrical distribution in her lifetime and was rediscovered and restored decades later, in 2015.

She taught film at the City College of New York and left behind stories and plays published only after her passing. Kathleen Collins died of breast cancer on September 18, 1988, at the age of forty-six. Long overlooked, she is now honored as a visionary whose quiet, questioning art gave Black interior life its rightful place on the screen.