Johanna Pyykkö has a bachelor’s degree in film directing from The Norwegian Film School (2016). She has made several award-winning shorts and worked as Joachim Trier’s director’s assistant on his latest feature THELMA. She’s also been in writers’ rooms and worked as episode-writer for several drama series. One of them being the second season of critically acclaimed tv-series ‘Heimebane’ / ‘Home Ground’ (Screened at Berlinale – Tv-series, the Norwegian public broadcaster NRK and other Nordic channels such as SVT, Yle and DR).

Johanna Pyykkö has a Swedish-Finnish background (a mainly working-class Finnish speaking minority group in Sweden) and now lives and works in Norway. Her films are often about identity, belonging/alienation, gender and power.

She’s now developing four features and a tv-series and has received development funding from The Norwegian Film Institute – New Paths’ scholarships for three of her projects: the sci-fi-drama series ‘Year 2098’ (to be produced by Nordisk Film Production), for the features ‘Ebba: The Lover’ (to be produced by Ape&Bjørn) and ‘Mirrors On Evy’. ‘Ebba & The Lover’ got an Honorable Mention at the Scandinavian Debut pitch competition at The Norwegian International Film Festival in Haugesund in 2017. Her second feature, ‘The Swedish-Finn’, is in development with the Sweden-based production company Verket Produktion.

At the Göteborg International Film Festival 2017, Johanna Pyykkö was awarded the Bonnie Scholarship Dragon Award – presented to a filmmaker who has made a special effort. The same year, she was chosen for the FilmLab Norway-program and in 2018, she was selected to participate in the Nordic Film Lab held by the film institutes of Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland together with Göteborg International Film Festival. In 2018 she was chosen for the development program UP arranged by Talent Norge and The Norwegian Film Institute. This year Johanna Pyykkö received The Norwegian Art Council’s one-year filmmaker’s grant.