Biography

Les Guthman is an American director, writer, editor and production executive, who has the distinction of both having produced three of the 20 Top Adventure Films of All Time, according to Men's Journal magazine, and having won the National Academy of Sciences' (U.S) nationwide competition to find the best new idea in science television, which led to his film, Three Nights at the Keck, hosted by actor John Lithgow.He is currently producer, director and writer of the Advanced LIGO Documentary Project, a six-year collaboration with Caltech, MIT and the LIGO Laboratory, funded by the National Science Foundation, MathWorks and Caltech. The Advanced LIGO Documentary Project was formed in the summer of 2015 to document and produce the definitive documentary about Advanced LIGO's search for, and expected detection of, the first gravitational waves, a discovery that would open up the 95% of the universe that was dark to our existing observatories and space based telescopes—the violent warped side described by Caltech's Kip Thorne 30 years ago in Black Holes and Time Warps.

On September 14, 2015, Guthman and his team were on location filming at the LIGO Livingston Observatory when the historic detection was made. Over the next five months, he had exclusive film access to document the long, careful process of scientific verification that was conducted by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration to confirm that the received signal was in fact a gravitational wave, as predicted by Albert Einstein more than 100 years ago.On October 3, 2017 LIGO physicists Rai Weiss, Kip Thorne and Barry Barish won the Nobel Prize in Physics.Principal photography on his feature documentary LIGO (film) finished in Stockholm for Nobel Week in December 2017. LIGO (film) was completed in May 2019 and won nine film festival awards in 2020-2021, including Best Documentary at the Solaris Film Festival in Vienna.He also wrote and directed an eight-part video series, LIGO: A Discovery That Shook the World distributed on YouTube.In December 2019, National Geographic named the LIGO detections at the top of its list of The 20 Top Scientific Discoveries of the Decade.Guthman produced the two LIGO programs at the 2016 World Science Festival in New York, including the main stage Saturday night panel moderated by physicist and best-selling author Brian Greene, and featuring Weiss and Barish, three of their colleagues and four short videos from the Advanced LIGO Documentary Project's exclusive footage inside the discovery.In 2013-2014, Guthman worked with New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson to create a science television series based on the newspaper's Science Times section.

For five years from 2008 to 2013, he was involved in 3D production and research, while making two feature documentaries in HD, Skiing Everest and Saturn's Embrace, along with building the XPLR Channel and brand for webcasting adventure, expedition, environmental and science documentaries in partnership with Ted Leonsis' SnagFilms.com and on Amazon Video. As part of his 3D work, Guthman licensed the exclusive worldwide 3D rights to Carnaval in Rio de Janeiro, in a partnership with Brazil's TV Globo.

Guthman was chairman of The Explorers Club's annual Artist in Exploration competition, sponsored by Rolex; from 2013 to 2016, and chairman of its $100,000 Foundation Mamont - Explorers Club World Exploration Challenge. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society.