Peter Skinner

Biography

Peter Skinner is an Academy Award-qualifying, St Kilda Best Film-winning, and Australian Directors Guild-nominated writer, director, producer, and editor. He began his career as a sculptor, earning a first-class honours Bachelor of Visual Arts, focusing on myth and narrative’s relationship to the figurative form. Peter then studied film theory, earning a Master of Film Studies from the University of Sydney in 2011, specialising in Cinema and National Identity. Peter further honed his craft at the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS), completing a Graduate Diploma in 2013 and a Master’s in Directing in 2019. His work merges his visual arts background with a strong narrative focus, garnering critical acclaim. As a founder at Seymour Pictures, Peter wrote, directed, produced, and edited his debut feature Two Ugly People, which was shortlisted for the 2024 Venice Film Festival with its world premiere set for 2025. Growing up in the working-class suburbs of South East Sydney, Peter’s films often explore the extra-ordinariness of ‘ordinary’ people grappling with romance, ambition, loneliness, and identity, the transformative power of love, and the cinematic layers of beauty and strangeness hidden in the everyday.