Carina Rosanna Tăutu

If I am to summarize my top skills built over 20 years of professional experience they are, on one hand, as a filmmaker, I build narratives, and, on the other, as a professional mediator, I dissolve them effectively.

Both as a mediator and filmmaker, I believe in an open ended story structure. To do so, we don’t need only intelligence, but also emotional intelligence. My personal life journey taught me how to balance both: I call it my open ended story experience. 

 Take my birth behind the Iron Curtain, in Romania. Under the roughest totalitarian regime in Eastern Europe, regardless of one’s economic or social status there was no hope in sight for a decade.

Being the daughter of the top structural engineer in the country and an urban planner, I never dreamt of being an artist. Arts were politicized. A smart kid from an intellectual family that had a “tainted past” (my grandfather was the captain of the Royal Ship and died in a communist prison after the Soviet takeover), my path was set to Neuroscience. Then, the 1989 revolution happened. The most rigid structures crumbled overnight when we almost were out of hope.

The next decade, what we expected to be a deliverance new story, was tinted by economic ambiguity and corruption. Science and arts were defunded. No one was prepared for this. My father died in 1991 at the hight of his career. One hot summer, I took a rarely well paid side-job as a translator on an American horror film set (not a fan of the genre at all!) - I had to help paying my sister’s tutors for architecture school. This job radically shifted my life: while earning my MSc in Neuroscience I was selected as one of the 6 students to study film directing in the Romanian national film school. Two decades later, adding an MFA in film from Columbia University in New York, I filmed, lived and learned amazing stories working around the globe. 

As I look back, I see now the root of it all: my genius Greek maternal grandmother’s storytelling and cooking and my grandfather’s wit that had a clear Sufi taste. My mother brown dreamy eyes and my father’s Viking-like structured face. Integrating opposites is my second nature. From them I learn to integrate the past and move forward. Curiosity and learning are my internal engines. 

 In 2014 I ended a 14 year long marriage and moved to Los Angeles. In screenwriting “the plan falls apart” it’s a false ending, a cliffhanger to keep the story exciting. With 4-7% rate of women paid as film directors, I asked myself how can I serve better while recalibrating my life. I have passion for film, but it was time to use the skills I have on a wider field. My work as a film director and producer is a complex left/right brain activity. It requires similar talents to executive skills: deep listening, empathy and high EQ, long term strategy focus on the project and the team not yourself, practical imagination finding creative solutions . 

A meditation walk at Point Dume lead me into the mediation world. As I earned my Masters in Dispute Resolution from Pepperdine Law, I mediated over 40 hours in the LA court system, I interned for Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and shadowed one of the top mediators in the country, Anthony Piazza in San Francisco in a $27 million biotech dispute. Combining my documentary and mediation skills, I created the Beverly Hills Bar Association webcast “Mediator’s Talk”, that I host and producer in collaboration with BHBA.  

I love humans, I love stories, and I’m not afraid of conflict: I’m here to serve you as a coach, consultant and mediator solving practical matters while also remembering our way back to the heart. It’s a long term strategy to do so, and I’m happy to help you navigate it.