Anna is an international actor and writer based in New York. She has attracted critical acclaim from The New York Times, Variety, and The Village Voice, among others. She has received the prestigious 2-Year Emerging Artist Grant from the Norwegian Arts Council, as well as the 2007 Cultural Grant from American Scandinavian Society.

Adding to her wide and varied body of work as a stage actress (see resume), Anna has been cast in a growing number of films, including recently in Gone with the Woman by Academy Award-nominated director Peter Næss, where she plays opposite Peter Stormare (Fargo, Minority Report). In the past year, she also played the lead in two feature films (The Contenders and Tom & Valkyrie) alongside other film and theater projects.

She discovered acting at an early age when she found the stage to be ideal for transforming her mischief and redheaded energy into an enjoyable feast – and she discovered that the exploration of characters was the perfect vehicle for figuring out people and life around her. Her desire to understand why people act the way they do first arose as a child when the colorful characters in her own life made surprising decisions that left her full of unanswered questions. This coincided with Anna’s first foray into acting – a career that transformed this curiosity for understanding into a powerful source of inspiration.

She began acting at age eight, finding ravenous joy in playing villains, from the mischievous Loke in Norse mythology to the Evil Witch in Snow White and The Beast in Teenage Little Red Riding Hood. She grew up in the forest outside of Oslo, but her talent soon brought her to the city where she made her professional stage debut shortly after high school when award-winning director Stein Winge cast her as Solveig (the classic ingénue character in Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt). While working full time as an actor and increasing her range (earning major roles such as Lady Anne in Shakespeare’s Richard III and Sarah in a young version of Harold Pinter’s The Lover), Gutto also studied philosophy at the University of Oslo before enrolling in Circle in the Square Theatre School in New York. There, she soon realized, that among the students previously treading the same flakey linoleum as herself, were some of the American actors she respected the most, such as Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Benicio del Toro. She has since had an increasingly successful career.

In addition to moving from the fairytale forest of Norway to the asphalt jungle of New York and taking on one leading role after the other, she co-founded and is co-artistic director of Unbound Collective (www.unboundcollective.org) and Oslo Elsewhere (known for introducing Jon Fosse to American audiences) and has written, adapted and produced several plays as well as written essays for theater publications. This and much more made a colleague recently refer to her as “the Viking goddess for the modern day discovery of America”.