Peter Vronsky Biographical Curriculum Vitae
Peter Vronsky is an investigative historian, author, filmmaker and new media artist.
He holds a Ph.d. in the history of espionage in international relations and
criminal justice history from the University of Toronto. He was born in Canada
and has been shooting and producing investigative documentaries and independent
films since 1975.Peter Vronsky is the author of Sons of Cain: A History of Serial Killers From the Stone Age to the Present, published by Berkley Books - Penguin Random House, 2018.
Peter Vronsky is the author of true-crime history bestsellers, Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (Berkley Books - Penguin Random House, 2004.) The sequel Female Serial Killers: How and Why Women Become Monsters was published by Berkley - Penguin Random House in 2007. His book based on his doctoral dissertation is Ridgeway: The American Fenian Invasion and the 1866 Battle That Made Canada (Allen Lane - Penguin Random House Canada, 2011) a controversial study of the hidden history of Canada's first modern battle during the Fenian Raids of 1866.
He worked extensively in Europe, the former Soviet Union, Middle-East, South Africa and in Canada and United States producing and directing numerous cutting edge investigative documentary television specials on subjects ranging from early punk rock and flashback syndrome in Vietnam war veterans to organized crime and nuclear materials smuggling in the break-away regions of the former Soviet Union.
Peter Vronsky is the creator of a body of formal video art works exhibited in the 1980s internationally, a former Sony Corporation Artist-in-Residence, and a cited historian of Lee Harvey Oswald's journey to the USSR in 1959-1962.
Vronsky earned a Ph.D. in the History Department of the University of Toronto in the fields of criminal justice history and intelligence in international relations. His doctoral thesis, “Combat, Memory and Remembrance in Confederation Era Canada: The Hidden History of the Battle of Ridgeway, June 2, 1866” on the origins of the Canadian secret services during the Civil War era and the Fenian Crisis in Canada focuses on the 1866 battle near Fort Erie, Ontario fought by Canadian volunteers to stop a 1000 strong invasion force of heavily armed Fenian Irish-American insurgents. The dissertation was published in 2011 by Penguin Books as Ridgeway: The American Fenian Invasion and the Forgotten 1866 Battle That Made Canada, a volume in their Canadian History series, edited by Robert Bothwell and Margaret Macmillan.
Vronsky currently lectures in international relations history, the American Civil War, terrorism, espionage and the history of the Third Reich at Ryerson University in Toronto.
Vronsky is the
producer-writer-director of the acclaimed feature documentary about underground
Stalinism in the last days of Soviet Russia: the last days of Soviet Russia:
Mondo Moscow: The Art & Magic of Not Being There
(1992), produced for TV Ontario and broadcast in City-TV's
primetime movie slot for four years running. He was the director of
Crash'n'Burn
(1977)--an early look at Punk Rock in Toronto and on the road in New York.
He was the co-writer of the National Film Board of Canada feature documentary The Un-Canadians (1996). Vronsky is also the director of a dramatic feature film: Bad Company (1978).
In between his own independent productions, Peter Vronsky has worked as a production manager, line producer, director of photography and new media artist. He field-produced Venice and Adriatic Region coverage for CNN and shot undercover and hidden camera sequences for CTV's W5 and CBC's The Fifth Estate, investigative TV programs.
VVronsky's last undercover shoot took him to the troubled breakaway republic of Chechnya, where his hidden cameras documented the secret market for nuclear weapons materials for a CTV-Discovery Channel USA-FujiTv-ORF Stornoway Productions co-production of The Hunt For Red Mercury /a> (1993).
Vronsky was the Director of Photography on I'll
Fly Away Home (2004) and Life Could Be A Dream (2002), feature
documentaries for Bravo Canada/Bravo USA.
In 2000 Vronsky was the founding Bureau Chief of the Queens Park/Toronto
Bureau of
Epress.ca,, Canada's
first officially accredited internet streaming video news portal. Later
that year he
joined GlobalNetFinancial.com, a Los Angeles-based global investment streaming
video news and online trading platform with sites in Europe and North America,
where he was their Broadband Content Specialist. GlobalNetFinancial
perished in the 2001 dot-com stock market collapse. Vronsky is highly
experienced in convergence of television and video with the Internet, non-linear
interactive scripting and online streaming content design. In 1997-2000 Vronsky was the Head
of Documentary and English Language Production in Italy for
Panavideo,
a service producer for RAI,
the Italian national television broadcasting network. Vronsky produced
live and taped television broadcasts in the Venice region and is an expert on
the logistics of film and video production management in the water-bound city.
Vronsky has extensive international production experience as a producer, director and/or director of photography on locations in Russia, Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Netherlands, UK, Austria, former Yugoslavia, Jamaica, South Africa, and in North America.
Peter Vronsky's 1991-1992 research and journey to the USSR to
locate a series of never-before-interviewed witnesses to accused assassin Lee Harvey
Oswald's life there is a subject in professor John Newman's academic study of Oswald's
alleged CIA connections (Oswald and the CIA.) The results of
Vronsky's research and interviews have been featured in numerous books and television
programs,
including Norman Mailer's Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery, VVincent
Bugliosi's 2007 Reclaiming History: The Assassination of
President John F. Kennedy, best-selling author David Lifton's upcoming biography of Oswald, and PBS's
definitive 1993 television biography of Oswald produced by Frontline.
Vronsky maintains an often cited website focusing on Oswald's life in the
USSR and is a recognized authority on Lee Harvey Oswald's time in the USSR.
(See: Lee Harvey Oswald In Russia
Website )
Vronsky
has more than twenty years of
experience in the field of digital new media, starting with his role as Artist-in-Residence at the
Sony Corporation in 1983-85 where he experimented with Sony's
then state-of-the-art digital graphics and interactive laser
optical systems. He created a number of formal experimental
video
art works and new media
installations, exhibited internationally and in Canada, including a group showing at
the Art Gallery of Ontario and at Canada House in London, England.
Peter Vronsky is fluent in English, Russian and Italian, and currently resides in Toronto Canada and Venice Italy.
His main website is www.petervronsky.org
