Peter Musurlian
Peter Musurlian co-founded the independent documentary production company, Globalist Films, in 2003, in the midst of an eclectic 20-year professional career in television news, governmental public service, and overseas US-Army journalism.
He was born in Racine, Wisconsin and raised in Torrance, California. His mother Araksi, who arrived in New York from Istanbul in the late 1950s as a nursing student, was the daughter of an illiterate dairy farmer. Growing up, she saw her father struggle with a debilitating limp he developed due to beatings meted out by Turkish soldiers in the early 1900s, while he was a conscript in the Ottoman Army.
His father John, who served in Seoul during the Korean War, was the son of Genocide survivors, who escaped the historical Armenian homelands of Central Turkey, during the first Genocide of the 20th Century. During that period, from 1915 to 1923, between one and two million men, women and children were systematically massacred by the Ottoman Turks; events that continue to be routinely denied by the government of Turkey, but officially recognized in capitals around the world.
Peter has a bachelor’s degree in Broadcast Journalism and Political Science from the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles; a master’s degree in Political Science from Baylor University in Waco, Texas; a master’s degree in Journalism & Public Affairs from the School of Communication at American University in Washington, D.C.; and a master’s degree in Management from the School of Business at the University of Redlands in California.
In the 1980s, Peter worked as a television news reporter and weekend anchor in Great Falls, Montana; a reporter/videographer in the Temple, Texas bureau of KWTX-TV; and as a reporter at Sun World Satellite News, a now-defunct Washington, D.C. television news service, which sent (by satellite) localized stories from Capitol Hill to small- and medium-market newsrooms around the U.S., mostly to Sun Belt states.
Peter’s last job in Washington, D.C., was in 1989, as producer of the national interview program, “John McLaughlin’s One on One,” seen on more than 100 PBS stations across the country.
In the 1990s, Peter worked in the California office, as district director, for now-retired Congressman Carlos Moorhead, who represented Glendale, Burbank and Pasadena. During his six years with the congressman, Peter had a chance to expand the scope of his volunteerism and public service. He chaired the Education Subcommittee of the Glendale Chamber of Commerce, chaired a local American Heart Association chapter and served on the board of directors of the Glendale-Crescenta Valley Red Cross. As a Red Cross volunteer, Peter spent a week in St. Charles, Missouri during “the Great Floods of 1993,” primarily filling sandbags and assisting at a Red Cross shelter.
Peter was also an Army Reservist for six years. In that capacity, in 1992, he received the Army’s Humanitarian Service Medal for his public-affairs-related work at Homestead Air Force Base in Florida following Hurricane Andrew.
From 1997 to 1998, Peter was activated for eight months to serve as an Army television journalist in Hungary, Croatia and Bosnia. His one-man-band reports from the region, seen on American Forces Network throughout the world, earned him the NATO Medal and an Army Commendation Medal.
Upon returning from Central Europe, Peter was hired as the Station Manager & Senior Producer @ BTV6, the government access channel run out of Burbank City Hall. A decade later, he has received more than 40 industry awards for his work at BTV6. In addition to those accolades, his news and feature reporting garnered him two prestigious RTNA Golden Mike Awards. And, in 2001, he received a Los Angeles Area Emmy nomination for producing Burbank Magazine, a quarterly news magazine he created in 1999. And, in 2007, he received his second such Emmy nomination for co-producing a public service announcement designed to help parents prevent children from drowning. Peter is a member of the RTNA: the Radio & Television News Association of Southern California; the Los Angeles Area Academy of Television Arts & Sciences; the American Film Institute; and the International Documentary Association.
In 1998, Peter married the former Szilvia Eva Gadanyi, co-founder of Globalist Films. The couple’s only child, June Petra, was born on December 5, 2004.
For more on his documentaries, go to: www.globalistfilms.com