Peter Yost

Peter Yost is the founder of Brooklyn-based Pangloss Films. As a Director/Producer/Writer his works have been nominated for Columbia-Dupont, WGA, and multiple Emmy Awards. His feature documentary Drop Dead City (co-directed with Michael Rohatyn) won the Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film, played 14 straight weeks at NYC’s IFC Center, and was named to Variety’s Best Documentaries of the Year list. Richard Brody of The New Yorker called it “an extraordinary historical documentary.”

Yost’s American Experience film Nazi Town, USA was nominated for both an Emmy and a 2025 Columbia-Dupont Award and his film for the same series, Clearing the Air, was nominated for a WGA Award.

Other projects include the four-hour PBS series Mysteries of Mental Illness about the history of psychiatry; Inside North Korea and The Color of Oil (both Emmy nominated); and Solitary Confinement, which led to prison reforms in Colorado and elsewhere.

Yost has also produced/directed nine films for NOVA/PBS on everything from the Hubble Space Telescope to the inner workings of cryptocurrency, and more than a dozen films around the world for National Geographic’s “Specials” unit. He was also recently Story Producer for the Netflix documentary, The New Yorker at 100 which was named a Best Documentary of the Year by Variety and nominated for an Emmy.

Yost is a graduate of Swarthmore College.