Anna Gutto

Director, screenwriter and actor Anna Gutto has been working in theater and film since she was a child. She is known for Paradise Highway, A Light Above (2017), Mommy Heist (2016) and The Kangaroo (2012). She was born in Norway, to artists Karin Eie and Guttorm Guttormsgaard. Those childhood years spent in her father’s studio and her mother’s pottery workshop provided her an arts education from a young age, something that’s vividly present in her work as a director.In her native Norway, Anna worked at some of the renown state theaters, before she moved to New York in her early twenties and became the Artistic Director of two theater companies. She launched 10 plays in 10 years with critical acclaim. Among other outlets, The New York Times described the work as “universally excellent.” She consulted on three seasons of Boardwalk Empire and produced classical piano concerts at Carnegie Hall. Anna received her MFA in Film from Columbia University where she graduated with honors in May 2016. She received The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Production Grant for her short film A Lucky Man (2017). Gutto won the 2016 Zaki Gordon Award for Excellence in Screenwriting for her feature script Paradise Highway, which became her debut feature, with a star-studded cast, lead by Academy Award-winning actors Juliette Binoche and Morgan Freeman alongside Hala Finley, Cameron Monaghan and Frank Grillo. The film premiered at the Piazza Grande at the 2022 Locarno Film Festival. The film was hailed as a “singularly promising debut for a first-time feature filmmaker” by Variety.Anna lives in Santa Monica with her husband Michael Soussan and their two children.