Peter Samuelson


Peter Samuelson is an American and British TV and film producer known for films such as Revenge of the Nerds and Arlington Road.

Background

Samuelson was born in London, England, and has a master's degree in English Literature from the University of Cambridge. 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 at the University of Southern California.

Projects

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

Producer and executive producer

In 1982 Samuelson and his cousin, actress Emma Samms, were inspired by a boy battling an inoperable brain tumor, and started the Los Angeles based non-profit organization Starlight Children's Foundation which brings entertainment and technology to children in hospitals.
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 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 2014, Samuelson founded ASPIRE, the Academy for Social Purpose in Responsible Entertainment, a national 501 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.