When the filmmaker, playwright and fiction writer Kathleen Collins died of breast cancer in 1988, at 46, she left behind a wide body of work that’s only beginning to see the light of day.

She was among the first black women to direct a feature-length film. That movie, “Losing Ground” (1982), parsed black intellectual life in New York City; it was about a female philosophy professor and her wayward husband, a painter. It never had a theatrical release. Just last year its premiere was held at Lincoln Center, where it played to sold-out crowds.

She was a feverish artist, working on many fronts. In an essay in the September issue of Vogue, her daughter, Nina Lorez Collins, recalls, “When I think back, the dominant sounds of my childhood are of my mother’s IBM Selectric II clattering away behind her bedroom door; film swishing through the Steenbeck editing machine that sat in our dining room; and, occasionally, Tina Turner blaring from the stereo while she danced like a madwoman in the living room.”

Ms. Collins grew up in Jersey City, where her father was a funeral director who became a state legislator. She graduated from Skidmore College and received a master’s degree in French literature from Paris-Sorbonne University. She worked to register black voters in Georgia with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the early 1960s and was twice arrested. She was a film history professor at City College. Her plays include “In the Midnight Hour” (1980) and “The Brothers” (1982).