Peter Campus

Peter Campus, (born 1937) is an American born artist, known for his interactive and single channel video work of the early 1970s, alongside an extensive body of photographic and digital video works to the present day. His work is widely collected by major museums and galleries, including the MoMA in New York, the Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, Tate Modern, the Renia Sofia and the Centre Pompidou.

Childhood

Campus has an eastern European Jewish family background; his father was Romanian, a doctor, while his mother was Ukrainian. Campus was born in 1937 and brought up in New York, but his mother died when he was aged seven, an event that coloured Campus’ youth and family life. Several family members worked in the art world and he developed an early interest in photography, which his father taught him, and painting. Campus cites the influential experience of watching Michael Powell movies as a teenager. He decided to study experimental psychology at Ohio State University, where he earned his degree in 1960.