Peter Decherney is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, fine art photographer, and author. He holds the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Endowed Chair in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is Professor of Cinema & Media Studies and Director of the Penn Global Documentary Institute.

Peter is the author or editor of seven books including HOLLYWOOD’S COPYRIGHT WARS: FROM EDISON TO THE INTERNET and HOLLYWOOD: A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION. His writing has also appeared in The New York Times, Forbes, and Inside Higher Ed, among many other publications.

His photographs of global Jewish communities have been exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, and Philadelphia, and his book of photography, ENDLESS EXODUS: THE JEWISH EXPERIENCE IN ETHIOPIA, is forthcoming in Spring 2026.

Since 2019, Peter has partnered with African Jewish communities on a series of documentary film s. The award-winning DAYS BETWEEN REST and THE CAVE SYNAGOGUE chronicle pivotal moments in the history of the Uganda’s Abayudaya Jewish community; YIDDLE YIDDLE ON profile’s Johannesburg’s only Yiddish singer, Leigh Nudelman; and LEMBALAND, a documentary road movie, follows a leader of South Africa’s Lemba community on a journey of discovery. The film that started the series, DREAMING OF JERUSALEM (co-directed with Sosena Solomon), about the Jewish community in Ethiopia, is a Discovery+ original.

In another ongoing series, Peter profiles artists navigating political struggles. His virtual reality docuseries THE HEART OF PUERTO RICO, about artists in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria (co-directed with Jean Lee), won the Best VR Experience and Best Director awards at the AT&T Film Awards. IS IT BECAUSE I’M A GIRL, about the South Sudanese Hip-Hop Dancer Nao.G, premiered at the Miami Film Festival and has won many top festival awards. Also in this series are FILMMAKING FOR DEMOCTRACY IN MYANMAR and POSTIGO EXPRESS, the story of photojournalist Fernando Postigo who chronicled the Basque separatist movement from the 1970s to the early 2000s.

Peter has been an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Scholar, a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, and a U.S. State Department Arts Envoy to Myanmar. He is an award-winning teacher, whose open online course on the history of Hollywood has enrolled more than 80,000 learners. He also holds a secondary appointment at the Annenberg School for Communication and an affiliation with the Penn Law Center for Technology, Innovation, and Competition.

More at decherney.org