Peter Hutton was born in Detroit on August 24, 1944 to Donald Hutton and Dorothy Plunkett Hutton. His mother was an amateur painter, and his father, a former merchant seaman, was the founder of a small film society. Peter grew up looking at photo albums from his father's travels, fascinated by images of far-flung locales and vast seascapes. At eighteen, his father advised him to enlist, and Peter began his life at sea as a merchant marine in Honolulu, alternating between working on saltwater ships and attending art school for painting at the University of Hawaii. There he studied under primarily Japanese and Chinese teachers, who gave him an appreciation for the Eastern approach to art, which would inform his contemplative approach to filmmaking. Peter then moved to San Francisco, where he attended the San Francisco Art Institute, initially for sculpture, then performance art. He ventured into filmmaking by chance, while documenting a performance he'd organized, later telling the blog Cinemad, “When I got the film back, I was struck by how beautiful the film record of the event was, in terms of its graphic quality. And I thought, ‘Maybe I can just film things and not worry about creating events.’ From that moment, I started making films.” He went on to receive his master's degree in filmmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1971.
Peter Hutton completed over twenty films in the course of his cinematic career: silent, meditative 16mm portraits of urban and natural landscapes. He taught film production at Hampshire, CalArts, Harvard, and SUNY Purchase, before settling at Bard College in 1985, where he served as chairman of the Film and Electronic Arts program for twenty-seven years. His work has been exhibited widely across the United States and Europe, including retrospectives at Anthology Film Archives in 1989 and the Museum of Modern Art in 2008. Peter passed away in 2016.
