When Kathryn Bigelow walked on stage in 2010 to accept the Oscar for Best Director, it wasn’t just a win for one filmmaker – it was the first time in more than 80 years of Academy history that a woman claimed that prize.
But Bigelow’s breakthrough is just one chapter in a larger, messy story about how slowly the major awards – the Oscars, the BAFTAs and the Golden Globes – have recognised women behind the camera.
In this episode of Cinema Awards Archive, we’re walking through the key milestones: the “firsts,” the long gaps and the recent years where things finally started to shift.
Use the links below to jump to each segment – from the first woman ever nominated for Best Director to the rare club of women who have actually won at the Oscars, BAFTA and the Golden Globes.
- Segment 1 – Setting the Stage – why women directors were treated as exceptions, not the rule.
- Segment 2 – Oscars – from Lina Wertmüller’s first nomination to Bigelow, Zhao and Campion actually winning.
- Segment 3 – Golden Globes – Barbra Streisand’s lonely win and the 37‑year gap before another woman took the prize.
- Segment 4 – BAFTA – how slow recognition and recent reforms changed the landscape.
- Segment 5 – Beyond the “Firsts” – the wider wave of women directors reshaping awards season.
- Segment 6 – Why These Milestones Matter – why tracking “firsts” is really about power, funding and who gets called a “great director.”
- Conclusion – where to go next and how to join the conversation.
If you just want the headline moments, here are the turning points for women directors at the Oscars, Golden Globes and BAFTA:
- 1977 – First Oscar nomination: Lina Wertmüller becomes the first woman nominated for Best Director for Seven Beauties at the 49th Academy Awards.
- 1984 – First Golden Globe win: Barbra Streisand wins Best Director at the Golden Globes for Yentl, then stands alone as the only female winner for 37 years.
- 2010 – First Oscar win: Kathryn Bigelow breaks the barrier as the first woman to win the Oscar for Best Director with The Hurt Locker.
- 2021 – First Asian woman wins Globe & Oscar: Chloé Zhao wins Best Director at both the Golden Globes and the Oscars for Nomadland, becoming the first Asian woman and first woman of colour to take those directing prizes.
- 2022 – First woman with two Oscar directing nominations: Jane Campion wins Best Director for The Power of the Dog, after earlier being nominated for The Piano, and joins Bigelow and Zhao as only the third woman to win the directing Oscar.
- 2020s – Globes’ first majority‑women directing lineup: The Golden Globes nominate Regina King, Chloé Zhao and Emerald Fennell in the same year, marking the first time women outnumber men in the Best Director category.
For most of the 20th century, the big three awards bodies treated women in the director’s chair as exceptions, not the rule. At the Oscars, decades passed with zero women nominated for Best Director; at the Golden Globes, only a handful of women even made it onto the ballot; and BAFTA’s directing category remained heavily skewed towards men.
So when we talk about “milestones,” we’re really talking about moments that broke through years of silence – the points where the door opened just a crack, then slowly a little more.
Let’s start with the Oscars, because this is where the drought was most visible. For decades, no woman was nominated for Best Director at all; then slowly, a tiny shortlist started to form.
Lina Wertmüller became the first woman nominated for Best Director for Seven Beauties at the 49th Academy Awards in 1977. Jane Campion followed with The Piano, Sofia Coppola with Lost in Translation – all historic nominations, but none of them converted into wins.
The breakthrough came with Kathryn Bigelow. In 2010, she became the first woman ever to win the Oscar for Best Director for The Hurt Locker. It was a double milestone: her film also beat Avatar, directed by her ex‑husband James Cameron, and proved that a tense, mid‑budget war drama directed by a woman could take the top directing prize.
In the 2020s, two more women finally joined her. Chloé Zhao won Best Director for Nomadland, becoming the first woman of colour and the first Asian woman to take that Oscar; Jane Campion returned to the category and won for The Power of the Dog, becoming the first woman to be nominated twice for directing and the third woman to win.
So today, after nearly a century of Oscars, only three women have won Best Director – Kathryn Bigelow, Chloé Zhao and Jane Campion. It’s progress, but the numbers still tell you how long the climb has been.
Over at the Golden Globes, the story is just as stark, but with a very different headline name: Barbra Streisand. In 1984, she made history as the first woman to win the Golden Globe for Best Director, for Yentl. She even joked in her speech that she hoped it would open doors for other talented women – and then, for more than three decades, nobody followed her through.
For 37 years, Streisand remained the only woman ever to win that directing Globe. Women were occasionally nominated – including Jane Campion, Sofia Coppola, Kathryn Bigelow and Ava DuVernay – but usually as the lone female name in a list of men, which actresses like Natalie Portman publicly called out on stage.
The logjam finally broke in the 2020s. Chloé Zhao became the second woman – and the first Asian woman – to win the Golden Globe for Best Director for Nomadland. Jane Campion joined the club soon after with The Power of the Dog, making Barbra Streisand, Chloé Zhao and Jane Campion the only three women to have won this prize so far.
Another milestone moment came when the Globes, for the first time, nominated three women in the same year – Regina King, Chloé Zhao and Emerald Fennell – which meant women actually outnumbered men in the category for once. After decades where women were barely present, even that symbolic shift mattered.
BAFTA has its own complicated track record with women in the director’s chair, often mirroring the industry’s broader imbalance. Historically, very few women were nominated for Best Director at the BAFTAs, and wins were even rarer, which made every breakthrough feel like an event.
New Zealand’s Jane Campion is one of the key names here too, racking up recognition for The Piano in the 1990s and later for The Power of the Dog across multiple awards bodies, including BAFTA. Directors like Kathryn Bigelow, Sofia Coppola and others have also picked up BAFTA recognition, slowly building a more visible presence for women in the directing category.
In recent years, BAFTA has tried to reform its voting and longlisting process to address systemic bias, which has led to more women being shortlisted and – crucially – more women actually winning major craft and above‑the‑line awards. The trend is far from perfect, but it’s the most sustained period of visibility women directors have had at BAFTA.
Focusing only on “first woman to win X” can make it sound like there are just three or four names that matter, but the reality is much richer. There’s now a whole wave of women directors whose films are reshaping awards season, even when they don’t win Best Director outright.
Ava DuVernay has brought stories like Selma and 13th into the centre of awards conversations, making systemic injustice impossible to ignore. Sofia Coppola has carved out a distinctive, often melancholic style with films like The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation, earning nominations across Oscars, BAFTAs and Globes.
Greta Gerwig moved from indie darling status with Lady Bird and Little Women to directing Barbie, the first billion‑dollar film from a solo woman director, forcing awards bodies and box‑office trackers alike to rethink what “women’s films” can look like. Meanwhile, filmmakers like Emerald Fennell, Chloé Zhao and others have shown that awards‑calibre directing can encompass everything from revenge thriller to intimate road movie to psychological western.
Taken together, their careers make it much harder for voters to fall back on the old excuse that there simply “aren’t enough women directors to nominate.”
So why spend time tracking who was “first” or who finally broke a 30‑year gap? Because awards don’t just hand out trophies – they shape which careers get funded, which stories get told and who audiences learn to call a “great director.”
When Kathryn Bigelow, Chloé Zhao or Jane Campion win major directing prizes, they not only lock in their own place in film history, they also become proof of concept for the next generation. Each milestone chips away at the old idea that a “typical” director is automatically male, and opens space for more diverse voices – across gender, race and nationality – to step behind the camera.
From Barbra Streisand’s lonely Golden Globe win in 1984, to Kathryn Bigelow finally breaking the Oscars barrier in 2010, to Chloé Zhao and Jane Campion rewriting the record books in the 2020s, the story of women directors at the Oscars, BAFTA and the Globes is still being written.
If you want more deep dives into awards history – from festival breakthroughs to “firsts” that took far too long – hit subscribe, ring the bell and tell me in the comments:
Which woman director do you think awards bodies have most underrated – and which film by a woman director would you give an Oscar, BAFTA or Globe to right now?
