Peter Samuelson

Co-founder and president of First Star (seventeen high school academies on college campuses for youth in foster care) and CEO of PhilmCo Media llc. (commercial films that use empathy to improve society), Peter Samuelson is a serial pro-social entrepreneur. In 1982, he co-founded the Starlight Children’s Foundation (psychosocial services for seriously ill children). By 1990, the positive impact of Starlight seeded his next pro-social endeavor, Starbright World (the world’s first avatar-based navigable social network for seriously ill teenagers), co-founded with Steven Spielberg. Following that, 1999 saw the formation of First Star; 2005 the founding of EDAR, the Everyone Deserves a Roof initiative (single-user mobile homeless shelters); and 2013 the launch of ASPIRE, the Academy for Social Purpose in Responsible Entertainment (media training for undergraduates not in film schools). In the midst of all this, Samuelson has produced twenty-seven films and raised four children. Educated at Cambridge and the Anderson School of Management at UCLA, he has been married to Saryl for thirty-five years, and continues to fight every day for those less fortunate, chief among them America’s abused and neglected children.

First in his family to attend college, Samuelson graduated from Cambridge on a full scholarship with a Masters in English Literature. After serving as production manager on films such as The Return of the Pink Panther, he emigrated from England to Los Angeles and produced Revenge of the Nerds, Tom & Viv, Wilde, Arlington Road, and twenty-three other films. Samuelson served on the three-person founding board of Participant Media, Jeff Skoll’s pro-social media company, which produced An Inconvenient Truth, The Help, Spotlight, and Green Book. From 2012 to 2013, Samuelson was the founding managing director of the Media Institute for Social Change at the University of Southern California.

Samuelson divides his time between producing films and serving pro bono as cofounder of the Starlight Children’s Foundation (www.starlight.org) with Steven Spielberg and founder and serving president of First Star (http://www.firststar.org/) and the Everyone Deserves a Roof initiative of Los Angeles (www.edar.org). He holds U.S. Patent No. 10,227,791 for a Single User Mobile Homeless Shelter. Samuelson lives in Los Angeles. Learn more at: www.samuelson.la.