Peter Labuza is a Researcher with the International Cinematographers Guild, IATSE Local 600. He works to support the over 10,000 members of camera crews and publicists working in creative media and beyond through assisting representatives to bargain for new policies that encourage the safety, security, and solidarity of the union.

Labuza was a distinguished academic before making the transition to labor, researching the history of the film industry’s legal and financial foundations. He received his PhD from the University of Southern California in 2020, where his dissertation, “When A Handshake Meant Something: Lawyers, Deal Making, and the Emergence of New Hollywood” was awarded the Society for Cinema and Media Studies prize for Best Dissertation, and also cited as a finalist for the Herman E. Krooss Prize for Best Dissertation in Business History. He is currently at work on transforming the dissertation into a book.

He has also published in Journal for Cinema and Media Studies, American Journal of Legal History,  Film History, Enterprise & Society, Framework, The Velvet Light Trap, Film Quarterly, Sight & Sound, the Los Angeles Times, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. With numerous published studies on the contemporary state of media industries and its financial relationship to Silicon Valley, Labuza has made media appearances discussing his work in The New Republic, the CBC, KQED, Slate, The Bulwark, The American Prospect, and more. He taught at USC, University of California, Berkeley, and San José State University.

Previously, Labuza was also a film critic in the pages of Variety, The Village Voice, Filmmaker Magazine, and more. He ran the wildly successful podcast The Cinephiliacs from 2012 to 2020. The archives of the podcast can be found here.

Peter also hosts a Substack entitled Monetary Thoughts with occasional posts on Film History and Media Industry related research.

You can communicate with Peter via email at plabuza@gmail.com.

This site serves as Peter’s general resume and CV to work he has done. All writing and research can be found via the page links on the left.

If you have arrived here via a broken link to a blog post, you will find the correct story on the blog posts page. If you cannot find it there, please contact him at plabuza@gmail.com.