Biography
Peter Lewis Walsh has had a varied career as a museum administrator, publisher, and designer, writer, editor, critic, media scholar, public speaker, and film actor. He began studying film acting in the fall of 2014. His first film, Spotlight (2015) premiered at the Venice and Toronto Film Festivals. Since then, he has performed in leading roles in such short films as Allen and Imran (2015), Davey Crocket (2015), Dungeons and Dragons and Delirium (2015), and The Diner (2016) and appeared in such feature films as Bleed for This (2015), The Resurrection of Victoria Wheeler (2015), The Lake of Simon (2015), Loud Places (2015), and Laila B (2016). He also took roles in the web series The Insurance Tapes and other projects.
Walsh was born in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up on Long Island, in Upstate New York, and in New England. He began acting in First Grade and in High School produced and directed several of his own plays. At Oberlin College, he worked with professor, dramatist, critic, and performance theorist Herbert Blau (co-founder of The Actor's Workshop in San Francisco and a director of the repertory company, Lincoln Center, New York), and was a founding member of the ODC, now an internationally known dance company and one of the leading dance organizations in the United States. At Oberlin, he took courses in Shakespeare and drama, performed in college dramatics under the direction of Wes Sanders, studied dance performance, and appeared in dance pieces by choreographers Yvonne Rainer, David Gordon, and Steve Paxton. Oberlin College friends and classmates included Tony Award-winning actor, clown, and performance artist Bill Irwin, choreographer and Guggenheim Fellow Brenda Way, Tony Award-winning designer and director Julie Taymor, and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Franz Wright.
Following graduation, Walsh worked for a year at an film company based in Greater Boston and for another year at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. His career as a museum administrator, designer, communications director, writer, publisher, consultant, and web producer has included stints and projects at the Harvard Museums of Natural History; the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Davis Museum at Wellesley College; the National Gallery, Washington, DC; and the Boston Athenæum. He was for a decade Chairman of the Massachusetts Art Commission.
Walsh is an art critic and has an international reputation as a media scholar. He has spoken often at MIT in Cambridge, MA, and has lectured at museums, colleges, and universities in the United States and in Europe. His academic papers have been frequently cited in the scholarly literature and have been used internationally in teaching writing, media studies, and museum studies. His articles and reviews have been published in the Boston Globe; Sculpture; Museums New York; Museums Boston; the Boston Phoenix; the Boston Review; The Arts Fuse; American Art Journal, Smithsonian Museum of American Art; in books published by MIT Press and Routledge; and in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science, among many other publications.
Walsh holds a master's degree in Art History from Harvard University and has studied film acting in Boston.
