Peter Hawley is an award-winning writer and director of feature films, television commercials and documentaries. As an undergraduate at Northwestern University he won a national student Emmy Award for his music video Next to You, and several awards and festival appearances for his short film The Law of Inertia. The success of these projects gave him the opportunity to write and direct the feature film, Victimless Crimes.
Beginning with his Master’s thesis at University of Chicago, a comparison of The Oresteia to The Godfather, Hawley has written extensively about film theory, technology and emerging trends in stories and articles about film and other topics for The Chicago Reader, Screen Magazine, Book Magazine. His interview with director Danny Boyle was published by the University Press of Mississippi in 2010.
In 1996, Hawley joined the faculty of Columbia College in Chicago, teaching across the entire film curriculum. In 2007 he became one of the “Original Seven” hires at Tribeca Flashpoint College in Chicago. He was named Academic Dean in 2014, and became Dean of Columbia College Hollywood in 2016. In 2017 he successfully merged the two schools to create one college with two campuses.
He is the host of the podcast Teaching in the Arts.
