Peter Gutiérrez was raised in New York City and Yonkers, New York. After earning a degree in psychology, he became a counselor, a substitute teacher at various grade levels, and eventually a full-time middle school teacher. It was then that he taught his first media literacy courses in the form of "film appreciation." It wasn't until nearly a decade later that he learned that what he'd been teaching was actually a type of "media literacy." In the intervening years, he had worked as both an editor at Prentice Hall developing 9-12 ELA programs and a comic book writer/editor. In 1996 he was nominated for an Eisner Award in the latter industry for scripting a collection of Japanese ghost stories.
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In the early 2000's Peter leveraged his experience in both pop culture and K-12 curriculum to become a leading advocate for media literacy education in the U.S. He also started a consulting business that served clients such as Sesame Workshop, Scholastic, and TOON Books. By the end of the decade he was a nationally recognized champion of using comics in the classroom, acting as a founding Board member of Reading with Pictures and serving on NCTE's Commission on Media. His work in these fields has continued over the past decade. In 2009, he was elected to the Board of the National Association for Media Literacy Education and began writing for Australia's Screen Education, becoming a columnist soon after. He has also been a member of the Online Film Critics Society, and has been nominated for an EduBlog Award for his work for School Library Journal. His work has been covered by Wired, ABC News, The New York Times, and Publishers Weekly. |
Peter's own writing has been published by the Financial Times, Teachers College Press, Language Arts, Pearson, Gannett, Temple University Press, ReadWriteThink.org, among other outlets/publishers. These days, however, he focuses mostly on his art and photography from his home in suburban New Jersey.
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