Anna Gutto

Anna Gutto, or Anna Guttormsgaard, is a Norwegian-born American film director, writer, and actor. She wrote and directed her debut feature-length film Paradise Highway, featuring Juliette Binoche and Morgan Freeman. Described as a "multi-hyphenate creative", her career has included playwriting, as well as translation and adaptation of Norwegian texts into English. and had experience as an exchange student in Indiana. She later moved to New York and completed a master of fine arts degree in film directing at Columbia University, with honors, in 2016. She refined the script for Paradise Highway while attending graduate school at Columbia. Guttormsgaard also performed in several plays by Fosse, including the U.S. premiere of SA KA LA (2008) and Night Sings Its Songs (2004), both at 45 Bleecker Street Theater in New York City. A review in The New York Times said the cast in Night Sings Its Songs was "uniformly excellent", noting that "Guttormsgaard's [character] smiles when she says awful things" to her husband, played by Louis Cancelmi.

Guttormsgaard translated and adapted Rosmersholm by Henrik Ibsen with Bridgette Wimberly and Oda Radoor, transposing the setting from Norway to America. In 2006, she played the main character Rebecca West, the live-in girlfriend of minister John Rosmer (Charles Parnell), for a double-bill staging together with Fosse's deathvariations at the 59E59 Theaters. Meanwhile, Ibsen News and Comment said, "By far the best of the lot was Anna Guttormsgaard as Rebecca, who overacted a bit but managed her second-act confrontations with Kroll and Rosmer with such power and conviction that one almost forgave her for her work as the translator and adaptor."

The Unbound Collective In addition to her work with Oslo Elsewhere, Guttormsgaard was co-artistic director of The Unbound Collective. Previously known as The Unbound Theater, the company presented works including Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas in 2003, and The Workroom by Jean-Paul Grumberg. In The Workroom, Guttormsgaard played Simone, a Jewish seamstress in post-war Paris whose husband has been deported. Playing Lona Waverton, a doctor struggling with the demands of work, family and friends, she was the only live character on stage, while other characters appeared as projections on her office wall during phone conversations and while playing voicemail messages.

Film and television career Acting Gutto appeared in the independent film The Contenders (2010), playing the "obnoxious hostess" of a weekend gathering of five friends, one of whom dies off-screen. She appeared in the film Gone with the Woman (Tatt av kvinnen) (2007), directed by Petter Næss.

Directing Prior to her feature-length film debut, Gutto directed five short films. She received a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to work on A Lucky Man, which tells the story of a college football player who is raped. Her other short films included Mommy Heist, which was broadcast on France Television's FR3. The film shoot took place in Mississippi in the summer of 2021. Meanwhile, The New York Times described it as a film that "does not quite hit its stride". In a review for RogerEbert.com, critic Robert Daniels argued that Gutto clearly wanted "the movie to serve as an indictment of a system" but that it "falters" despite the writer/director's best intentions.

Other grants and awards Gutto won the Zaki Gordon Memorial Award for Excellence in Screenwriting for her feature screenplay Paradise Highway (aka Leila M.).

She received the two-year Artist Working Grant from the Norwegian state (Arbeidsstipend for yngre kunstnere fra Statens kunstnerstipend). She received the 2007 Cultural Award from American Scandinavian Society.