About

Author photo courtesy of Marcela Rafea Photography

From genre-skewing adaptations of the Brothers Grimm, to supernatural horrors steeped in her Iowa upbringing, Gustavson’s scripts have been honored by Austin, Nicholl, and the Stowe Story Labs and Athena Film Festival screenwriting labs—where she is currently a 2024 Writers Lab attendee and finalist for their Emerging TV Writers Fellowship. 

Gustavson was honored as one of thirteen female-identifying filmmakers accepted into the inaugural 2021 Nyx 13 Minutes of Horror micro-short festival on Shudder, selected by judges from Blumhouse TV, the production artists behind Annihilation, Ex Machina, and The Wind, as well as writer-producer Tananarive Due.

A trained anthropologist and archaeologist, Gustavson also worked for over a decade developing and designing exhibits at The Field Museum of Natural History. There, in addition to collaborating with world-renowned scientists and production artists, Gustavson also worked as a dialogue facilitator, guiding complex creative- and community-centered conversations.

Her adaptation of Samantha Kolesnik’s novella Waif, co-written with Chicago director Jim Vendiola, is currently in development, as is a narrative documentary feature Gustavson is directing on a leather restoration specialist working with relics from the AIDS epidemic, (co-directed with Curtis Matzke, and Executive Produced by Lilly Wachowski and Anarchists United).