Peter Poulides

Executive Director of the Dallas Center for Photography (DCP)

https://dallascenterforphotography.org/

Peter Poulides is the founder and executive director of DCP. Photography and Peter discovered each other when he was 13, having just moved to Athens, Greece. When his high school teachers wondered why he wasn't in class, they knew to check the darkroom. Peter's biology teacher was his first photography mentor and that teacher's generosity and passion for helping a budding photographer came full circle when Peter started teaching 40 years later.

That's the short story. In between, Peter earned a degree in TV & film production from UNT and worked as an educational video producer. A dream of being a travel photographer came into focus when he began shooting for Travel & Leisure magazine. That led to over a decade of assignments for national and regional travel and business publications, newspapers and corporations. His client list included: Smithsonian Magazine, Food and Wine, American Airlines, Forbes, Fortune, Business Week, New York Times, Exxon, Frito Lay and Texaco.

In the 90's, with two small children, Peter wanted to stay closer to home. He transitioned to shooting stock photography and became a top selling producer for Getty Images. A creative detour took him deep into the world of motion picture special effects and industrial robotics.

In 2008 he started a little teaching on the side and soon became fully committed. Conversations with his son and daughter, who each chose education as a career path and were happy to school their dad, revealed a startling idea: that by teaching photography, Peter was having more of an impact on the art of photography than he ever had by producing images for publication.

Peter believes in the power of photography. He's looking forward to expanding DCP by connecting with other photography centers, offering a wider range of classes, creating youth programs and opening the DCP Gallery in 2019 which will host ongoing exhibits of local to national photographers. He believes that good photographs deserve to be released from their smartphone glass cages and given physical form on a gallery wall, telling their visual stories to engaged listeners.