Peter Samuelson

Career

Peter Samuelson is a serial pro-social entrepreneur, and president of Film Associates, Inc a media consultancy and production company. He is mainly a film and television producer, but has also been a production manager, senior corporate executive, and starred in The Return of the Pink Panther as the Clothing Thief. He was previously president of Spashlife, Inc and Chairman of the Executive Committee of Panavision, Inc. After serving as a production manager on films such as The Return of the Pink Panther, he emigrated from London to Los Angeles and produced Revenge of the Nerds, Tom & Viv, Wilde, Arlington Road and other films.

Samuelson also served on the initial three-person advisory board for Jeff Skoll's Participant Productions. He was the first managing director of the Media Institute for Social Change (MISC) at the University of Southern California.

Social entrepreneurship

As a social entrepreneur, in 1982 Samuelson and his cousin, actress Emma Samms, were inspired by a boy battling an inoperable brain tumor, and started the Starlight Children's Foundation, building it into a charity that now provides psycho-social services to six million seriously ill children a year, in six countries.

In 1990, Samuelson brought together leaders including Steven Spielberg and General Norman Schwarzkopf to create the STARBRIGHT Foundation, a charity dedicated to developing media and technology-based programs to educate and empower children to cope with the medical, emotional and social challenges of their illnesses. Five years later, they launched the interactive social network Starbright World that helps seriously ill children meet and develop relationships with peers through video, sound, text, and avatar based communication.

In 1999, Samuelson founded First Star Inc, a charity headquartered in Washington, D.C. that works to improve the public health safety and family life of America's abused and neglected children. First Star operates seven college prep Academies where high-school aged foster youth are educated and encouraged on college and university campuses. First Star Academies operate at UCLA, URI, UConn, GW in Washington DC, Loyola in Chicago, UCF in Florida and Rowan University in New Jersey.

In 2004, Starlight and STARBRIGHT completed a formal merger and became the Starlight Starbright Children's Foundation, where Samuelson served for 7 years as the international chairman of the organization.

In 2005, he founded Everyone Deserves a Roof (EDAR) to develop and distribute mobile, single-user structures which in the daytime serve as purpose-built recycling vehicles while at night time transform into tented bed enclosures.

In 2014, Samuelson founded ASPIRE, the Academy for Social Purpose in Responsible Entertainment, a national 501(c)(3) charity that teaches media for social change to undergraduate and graduate students across the university, regardless of their Major. ASPIRE’s new kind of digital literacy was first piloted at UCLA. It is now expanding to other universities and colleges.

Background

Samuelson was born in London, England, and has a master's degree in English Literature from the University of Cambridge. He is the son of Sir Sydney Samuelson and has two brothers. He currently lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children. He is the fourth of five generations employed in the film industry.

Projects

Samuelson has a career in the film industry that started in the early 1970s.

Producer and executive producer

Production manager