Kathleen Collins

Kathleen Conwell Collins was born on the eighteenth of March 1942 at Jersey City, New Jersey, the daughter of Frank L. Collins — a Jersey City undertaker and the first Black member of the New Jersey State Assembly elected from Hudson County in 1953 — and Loretta Eddins Collins. She was raised in the Black middle-class community of post-war Jersey City.

She completed the bachelor's degree in philosophy and religion at Skidmore College at Saratoga Springs, New York in 1963 — and the master's degree in French literature and cinema at the Sorbonne at Paris in 1966 under the supervision of the cinéma-vérité documentarian Jean Rouch.

She was hired in 1967 by the National Educational Television cooperative of New York as a junior film editor — and worked across the late 1960s and early 1970s as an editor of documentaries for the NET-Public Broadcasting Service Black Journal series under the editor William Greaves (placed in this archive).

She taught film at City College of New York from 1974 to 1988 — and chaired the City College film department from 1980 to 1988.

She directed her first feature film, The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy, in 1980 — a fifty-four-minute drama of three Puerto Rican brothers who restore a Hudson Valley estate.

She directed Losing Ground in 1982 — an eighty-six-minute drama of a Black philosophy professor in upstate New York whose marriage to a painter unravels across a summer. Losing Ground was the first American feature film directed by a Black woman. It was rejected by the principal American distributors of the early 1980s and screened only at academic film series across the 1980s before its theatrical restoration by Milestone Films in 2015.

She wrote and produced approximately fifteen plays for the New York Off-Broadway stage across the 1970s and 1980s — including The Brothers of 1982 at the American Place Theatre and In the Midnight Hour of 1986 at the Negro Ensemble Company.

She wrote a collection of short stories — Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? — published posthumously in 2016 by Ecco Press, the principal recovery of her literary work that established her late-twentieth-century reputation.

She died at New York on the eighteenth of September 1988 of complications of breast cancer, at forty-six.

She is honored here as the director of Losing Ground.