Kathryn Bigelow directing The Hurt Locker (Jonathan Olley / Summit Entertainment)
Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker) is a first-time Directors Guild of America nominee, but her former husband James Cameron (Avatar) won the DGA Award for his megablockbuster Titanic back in early 1998. Lee Daniels (Precious) and Jason Reitman (Up in the Air) are two other first-timers, while this is Quentin Tarantino's second nod (Inglourious Basterds) — his first was for Pulp Fiction (1994).
Bigelow is only the seventh (not fourth, as previously reported) woman to get a DGA nomination in the motion picture category, following Lina Wertmüller (Seven Beauties, 1976), Randa Haines (Children of a Lesser God, 1986), Barbra Streisand (The Prince of Tides, 1991), Jane Campion (The Piano, 1993), Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation, 2003), and Valerie Faris (with co-director Jonathan Dayton for Little Miss Sunshine, 2006).
I should add that Wertmüller, Campion, and Coppola went on the land Academy Award nominations as well — the only three female directors to date.
Lee Daniels is the first black filmmaker to be nominated as a motion picture director by the DGA. If the Academy nominates him, Daniels will become the second black person to receive a Best Director Oscar nod, after John Singleton for Boyz N the Hood (1991).
It isn't clear how many gay/bisexual directors have been nominated by the DGA in the past (George Cukor, for one, was nominated four times), but Daniels is surely one of the first openly gay filmmakers to get a DGA nod. Rob Marshall and Bill Condon are the only two others I can think of. Marshall won for Chicago (2002), while Condon was cited for Dreamgirls (2006).