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 The Bitch List, Austin, Nicholl, and the Athena-WIST screenwriting labs.  

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 difficult 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 co-directing with Curtis Matzke on a leather restoration specialist working with relics from the AIDS epidemic.