Bill Guttentag is a double Oscar-winning dramatic and documentary film writer-producer-director. His films have premiered at the Sundance, Cannes, Telluride and Tribeca film festivals. He directed Nanking (THINKFilm, 2007), a theatrical documentary which premiered at Sundance and featured Woody Harrelson, and was shortlisted for an Oscar. He also directed Soundtrack for a Revolution (Wild Bunch, 2009) had its international premiere at Cannes and was also shortlisted for an Oscar.

He wrote and directed the dramatic feature LIVE! (Atlas Entertainment, 2008)starring Eva Mendes and Andre Braugher, and produced by Chuck Roven. He also wrote and directed Knife Fight (IFC, 2013) starring Rob Lowe, Julie Bowen, Carrie-Ann Moss and Jamie Chung. Both films premiered at Tribeca.

Bill Guttentag won an Academy Award for the documentary Twin Towers (Universal, 2003). He has also received a second Oscar, three additional Oscar nominations, a Peabody Award, three Emmy Awards, three additional Emmy nominations, two Writers Guild Award nominations, a Producers Guild Award nomination, and a Robert Kennedy Journalism Award.

His films have been selected for Sundance three times, Telluride twice, Tribeca five times, and have won awards at numerous American and international film festivals. They have received a number of special screenings including at the Museum of Modern Art, Council on Foreign Relations, the Harvard Kennedy School, and the White House.

Bill Guttentag partnered with Richard Linklater on That Animal Rescue Show, on which they were executive producers and directors. The 10-part series, made for CBS All Access, premiered in October 2020. An episode from the series was part of the official selection of the 2020 Telluride Film Festival.

His film Only the Dead See the End of War, premiered theatrically at the 2015 Telluride Film Festival and premiered on HBO in 2016. He won an AACTA Award (Australian Academy Award) for best directing for a documentary, and a Walkley Award (Australian Pulitzer) for the film. The film was nominated for an Emmy.

Bill Guttentag created, executive produced, and directed the NBC series Crime & Punishment, which ran for three seasons (2002-2004). The series was part of the Law & Order family of shows, and was created with Dick Wolf, who was also an executive producer. Over the series’ run, nearly every show was in the Nielsen top 20.

He has directed commercials and other projects for a number of Silicon Valley companies including Google, Yahoo, and MasterClass. He is also an advisor to a number of Silicon Valley companies including Mattermost and MasterClass, where he directed the first and third classes (James Patterson and Serena Williams).

His novel, Boulevard was published by Pegasus Books/W.W. Norton in 2011. The French edition was published by Éditions Gallimard, where it was finalist for the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière. He co-wrote Masters of Disaster – The Ten Commandments of Damage Control (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2012). He has also written nonfiction pieces, including for The Wall Street Journal and The Los Angeles Times.

He has served on a number of film festival juries, including the Shanghai International Film Festival and the Morelia Film Festival.

Nanking, filmed largely in China,won awards at a number of US and international film festivals (including Sundance and Hong Kong), and after a theatrical release, played on Cinemax. Guttentag won a Peabody Award and Emmy Award, and was nominated for a WGA award for the film. Nanking’s international release included China, where it became the highest grossing theatrical documentary in Chinese history.

He has directed eight films for HBO, as well as films for ABC, CBS, Turner, and others.  He produced the film Groomed (Blumhouse) which premiered in 2021 on Discovery+ ,and directed Sublime (Interscope) which premiered at Tribeca in 2019. Additional films include The Cocaine War (ABC), and You Don’t Have to Die, a film he made for HBO, for which he also won an Oscar.

He has shown his films and given lectures at many US and international universities including: Yale; Harvard; the University of Pennsylvania; University of California, Berkeley; USC; Peking University; Tsinghua University; Fudan University; Kyoto University; the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts; and Freie Universität Berlin. Other screenings include the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; the Paley Center for Media; and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. 

He has taught at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (Stanford d.school).

Since 2001, Bill Guttentag has been a lecturer at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.