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Les Guthman is an American director, writer, and production executive known for producing three of the "Top 20 Adventure Films of All Time," as ranked by Men's Journal, and for winning the National Academy of Science's nationwide competition for the best new idea in science television, which led to his production "Three Nights at the Keck," featuring John Lithgow.
He serves as producer, director, writer, and editor of the feature documentary "LIGO," along with an eight-episode web series created in collaboration with Caltech, MIT, and the LIGO Laboratory. These projects are funded by the National Science Foundation, MathWorks, and Caltech. While filming the documentary, Guthman and his crew were present for LIGO's groundbreaking first detection of gravitational waves from the merger of two black holes—a discovery National Geographic named the top of its "Top 20 Discoveries of the Decade." This achievement led to Kip Thorne, Rai Weiss, and Barry Barish receiving the Nobel Prize in 2017. "LIGO" was completed in March 2019, and the YouTube series "A Discovery That Shook the World" remains in production.
Guthman created and produced the "Discover Magazine" series at Disney and later founded and produced Outside Television, the production arm of Outside magazine. His work there earned two Emmy nominations for Outstanding Documentary and Outstanding Camerawork (on Mount Everest), as well as numerous film festival awards.
Throughout his career, Guthman has produced 41 feature documentaries, directed 13, written 13, and edited 12, in addition to writing, producing, directing, and editing 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.
He served as chief creative advisor to the Annenberg Foundation from 2006 to 2007, leading its documentary and web production initiative, Explore Annenberg.
In 2008, he licensed all his Outside Television documentaries and established the XPLR Channel on Ted Leonsis' pioneering streaming platform SnagFilms to showcase adventure, environmental, and science films.
Guthman began his career as a story editor for the Peabody Award-winning PBS series "Visions" and spent a decade at NBC News in New York as a producer and writer for Tom Brokaw, as well as serving as NBC News Manager of Political Analysis.
