Peter Decherney is Professor of Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He holds a secondary appointment at the Annenberg School for Communication and an affiliation with the Center for Technology, Innovation, and Competition at Penn Law School. He is the Faculty Director of Penn’s campus-wide Online Learning Initiative and Director of the Cinema & Media Studies Program.
He is the author or editor of six books including Hollywood’s Copyright Wars: From Edison to the Internet and Hollywood: A Very Short Introduction. Prof. Decherney is also a regular contributor to Forbes.
The films he has directed have been shown at international festivals and include a documentary about Myanmar’s film industry, a virtual reality documentary about a Kenyan refugee camp, and a virtual reality documentary about Puerto Rican artists after Hurricane Maria. He is currently working on a film about the Jewish community in Gondar, Ethiopia.
Prof. Decherney 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 is available through the edX platform.