Les Guthman is a renowned American director, writer, and production executive with a remarkable career spanning multiple decades. He has produced three of the "Top 20 Adventure Films of All Time," as recognized by Men's Journal, and has also won the National Academy of Science's nationwide competition for the best new idea in science television.
Guthman's most notable production is the feature documentary "LIGO," which he produced, directed, wrote, and edited in collaboration with Caltech, M.I.T., and the LIGO Laboratory, funded by the National Science Foundation, MathWorks, and Caltech. The documentary follows the historic detection of gravitational waves from the collision of two black holes, a groundbreaking discovery that earned Kip Thorne, Rai Weiss, and Barry Barish the Nobel Prize in 2017.
Prior to his work on "LIGO," Guthman created and produced the "Discover Magazine" series at Disney and then founded Outside Television, the production division of Outside magazine. His productions received two Emmy nominations and multiple film festival awards.
Throughout his career, Guthman has produced 41 feature documentaries, directed 13, written 13, and edited 12. He has also written, produced, directed, and edited over 20 shorter video productions. In 2008, he launched the XPLR channel for webcasting adventure, environmental, and science documentaries in partnership with Ted Leonsis' SnagFilms.com.
Guthman has held various leadership positions, including chief creative advisor to the Annenberg Foundation from 2006-2007, where he headed its documentary and web production initiative, Explore Annenberg. He has also licensed his Outside Television documentaries and created the XPLR Channel on Snagfilms to stream adventure, environmental, and science films.
Before his work in television, Guthman began his career as a story editor for the Peabody Award-winning series "Visions" on PBS. He then spent a decade at NBC News in New York as a producer and writer for Tom Brokaw, as well as NBC News Manager of Political Analysis.
