Peter Kenworthy
By Martinique Davis
At its most quintessential, Mountainfilm is about climbing mountains, both literal and metaphorical. Each speaker or film is selected in the hope that when guests leave their seats, they disperse infused with inspiration and a keener global perspective. Of the thousands of viewers Mountainfilm has touched, Peter Kenworthy is one who has carried that spark beyond the theater doors. When he first attended Mountainfilm, he was a recent transplant toting a long background in corporate banking. “I remember being utterly taken by the festival,” he recalls, “and truly affected and inspired by a lot of the films I saw.”
Today, Kenworthy’s resume includes titles such as historical author, photographer, world traveler, teacher, reporter and, most recently, executive director of this organization. Kenworthy took the reigns at Mountainfilm last June and has spent the past year melding his business and financial expertise into its non-profit blueprint. Despite some obvious differences between corporate banking and a nonprofit film festival, he has taken lessons from the corporate arena and transposed them into the inner workings of Mountainfilm. “For me, it is the perfect mix of art and business,” Kenworthy says of his position.
Prior to moving to Telluride in 1992, Kenworthy lived in London with his family and worked for a British banking consultancy. When a two-year assignment to Istanbul floundered, it was Kenworthy’s second shift away from his profession in banking. With Istanbul canceled, he moved his then-wife Pip and three sons to his parents’ home in Pennsylvania, and—deciding he didn’t want to “take on the life of commuting into the city every day to be a banker on the Eastern seaboard”—he hopped a ride on a Greyhound bus to Glenwood Springs to find a new hometown out West. His itinerary included Aspen, Crested Butte and Telluride.
Kenworthy visited town on the eve of the end-of-ski-season street party and was immediately captivated. “Just the panorama was enough to hook me,” he says. He flew home (after swearing never to ride a bus cross-country again), rented a U-Haul and moved his family to Telluride. He worked for a mortgage company and two local banks over the course of a decade before finally pulling the plug on life as a banker for “the third, and I hope final, time.”
In 2005, his historical novel, Bank Job, was published and tells the story of the C.D. Waggoner bank robbery. Waggoner, president of the Bank of Telluride during Telluride’s boom and bust era of the early twentieth century (Kenworthy was also president of the Bank of Telluride for a time), conned several New York City banks into crediting him $500,000 just as his Telluride bank was on the verge of collapse in 1929. After finishing the novel, an on-and-off three-year project, Kenworthy moved to China with his son, Nick, in the fall of 2004. He spent seven months there, teaching English in a university in Wuhan. “It was, daily, a fascinating experience,” Kenworthy says. “I had marvelous adventures with my son and, perhaps best of all, spent virtually every day and night with him for the entire time we were away.”
Back in Telluride and following a stint reporting for The Telluride Watch newspaper, Kenworthy joined Mountainfilm. He says of the position: “There is the art part, yes, but there are many parts of this nonprofit business that adhere to for-profit business rules.” For this ex-banker, finding Mountainfilm’s “bottom line” is vital, but Kenworthy has discovered that it is a different bottom line. “It’s all about the mission and the message, and so it isn’t about the usual corporate ideal of optimizing financial return on investment,” he explains.
Kenworthy admits that it is not solely his experience in corporate banking that prepared him for this position. World travels have fundamentally altered his life and furnished him with an appreciation for different environments and cultures. He first traveled to Spain and lived there for six months as a senior in high school. “To really go somewhere and be there a while and get to understand the culture and get to know the people is an incomparable experience. It was shocking to me as a 17 year old to realize that America was not the epicenter of the universe. To this day, I still consider travel to be the most important form of education.”
During his banking career, Kenworthy spent time working and traveling in Africa, Eastern Europe, Scandinavia and the Middle East. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, he traveled to Afghanistan with local journalist Rob Schultheis as part of a humanitarian aide effort. He also took photos that were showcased that next spring at Mountainfilm. “Traveling and living abroad serves you in anything you do in life. It allows new ways of looking at things…. It helps you embrace the global community…and what I find so invaluable is that it teaches you as much about yourself as you learn about other people,” he says.
Applying these lessons back at work, Kenworthy says, “Being exposed to new worlds, even through film, can do so much to enhance a person’s sensitivities and tolerance. Expanding someone’s global perspective is more important than ever as the world shrinks.”
