Peter Martin

Peter Martin has a diverse background spanning outdoor education, wooden boat building, athletic coaching, and university teaching. He is currently a faculty member at Virginia Commonwealth University’s (VCU) branch campus in Doha, Qatar, where he began in 1999 as a founding faculty member of the Graphic Design BFA program.

From 2016 to 2020, he served as Interim Chair of the Graphic Design Department, co-leading the graphic design faculties of VCU’s Richmond and Doha campuses in a two-year collaboration to redesign the NASAD-accredited BFA curriculum. The new curriculum reflects the distinct cultural, economic, and political contexts of both campuses, fostering diverse inquiry spaces and learning processes that promote student growth in making, research, cultural literacy, and collaboration.

In 2023, Peter launched the Participation Design Lab, a creative research initiative that explores and develops transdisciplinary approaches to design—empowering people to shape their participation in the conversations, collaborations, and communities of everyday life. Since 2015, he has also applied his design thinking and organizational culture expertise in consulting and facilitating organizational development initiatives.