(John) Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum(March 25, 1867 – March 6, 1941) was a Danish-American born artist and sculptor famous for creating the monumental presidents' heads at Mount Rushmore, South Dakota, the famous carving on Stone Mountain near Atlanta, as well as other public works of art.

The son of Mormon Danish immigrants, Gutzon Borglum was born in 1867 in St. Charles, Idaho. Borglum was a child of polygamy. His father, James Miller Borglum, had two wives when he lived in Idaho—Borglum's mother and his mother's sister, his father's first, legal wife. His father decided to leave Mormonism and to go back to Omaha, where polygamy was illegal and taboo. He decided that Gutzon's mother would be cast out of the family and never spoken of again. His father worked mainly as a woodcarver before leaving Idaho to attend the Saint Louis Homeopathic Medical College in Saint Louis, Missouri. Upon his graduation from the Missouri Medical College in 1874, Dr. Borglum moved the family to Fremont, Nebraska, where he established a medical practice. Gutzon Borglum remained in Fremont until 1882, when his father enrolled him in Saint Mary’s Academy. After a brief stint at Saint Mary’s Academy, Borglum relocated to Omaha, Nebraska, where he apprenticed in a machine shop and graduated from Creighton Preparatory School. He was trained in Paris at the Académie Julian, where he came to know Auguste Rodin and was influenced by Rodin's impressionistic light-catching surfaces. Back in the U.S. in New York City he sculpted saints and apostles for the new Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in 1901; in 1906 he had a group sculpture accepted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art— the first sculpture by a living American the museum had ever purchased—and made his presence further felt with some portraits. He also won the Logan Medal of the Arts.