​

​

Ana Johann is an author, screenwriter, writer, and filmmaker whose work has been recognized across multiple artistic disciplines. She develops projects for film, literature, and television, working across fiction and documentary. Her practice is driven by the search for the singular form each story demands, approaching every narrative as an investigation into different ways of perceiving and representing the world.

​

In cinema, she directed Um Filme para Dirceu (A Film for Dirceu, 2012), the first feature-length documentary directed by a woman in the state of Paraná, Brazil. The film received the Special Jury Prize at the Brasília Film Festival for its innovative exploration of cinematic language.

 

She also directed the fiction feature A mesma parte de um homem (The Same Part of a Man, 2022), winner of the Helena Ignez Award at the Tiradentes Film Festival and the Brazilian Screenwriters Association (ABRA) Award for Best Original Screenplay, among other distinctions. In 2027, she will premiere her second fiction feature, Tantas coisas contêm em si o acidente (So Many Things Contain the Accident), alongside the animated short film Urgência por explosões silenciosas (Urgency for Silent Explosions).

​

In literature, she published the novel História para matar a mulher boa (A Story to Kill the Good Woman, Editora Nós, 2023), a semifinalist for the Oceanos Literary Prize. Her second novel, O perigo dos pequenos lábios (The Danger of Small Lips), will be published by Todavia in 2027.

​

Her work for streaming platforms includes the documentary audio series O Piloto (The Pilot, Globoplay, 2024) and the development of the documentary series Nua na Rede (Naked on the Web, HBO, 2026), for which she worked from the initial research through the first stages of screenwriting.

​

In 2015, she was one of the winners of the FRAPA Screenwriting Competition with the project Terrestre, later retitled Dias que Palpitam no Escuro (Days That Throb in the Dark). The project was selected for the Fundación Carolina–Ibermedia International Screenwriting Lab in Madrid (2017), was part of the SANFIC ODS LAB (2026), and received partial production funding from Brazil's Audiovisual Sector Fund (FSA).

​

Johann holds a degree in Journalism and, in 2005, received an Ibermedia scholarship to study documentary filmmaking at the University of Barcelona. In 2015, she completed a Master's degree in Communication and Language, research that resulted in the book The Construction of the Poetic in Screenwriting, dedicated to the relationships between dramaturgy, character construction, and forms of representation.

​

Her artistic work explores family structures, experiences of sexuality, the erotic imagination, and the mechanisms of repression embedded in culture. Across her films and books, reality is continually contaminated by the uncanny: subtle disruptions of everyday life reveal tensions, desires, and forms of violence that had remained invisible. Family units emerge as microcosms of broader social structures, while a significant part of her work engages with rural Brazil without being confined to it.

 

Her career has also been shaped through dialogue and collaboration with other authors. Alongside developing her own projects, Ana Johann works with screenwriters, directors, producers, and creative teams at different stages of the creative process, understanding both cinema and literature as spaces of listening, exchange, and collective inquiry. These collaborations deepen her ongoing research into narrative form and into the ways different creative perspectives can transform a story.