Peter Vanderwarker was born in 1947 in Boston, Massachusetts. His mother, a graduate of the prestigious Vesper George School of Art, was the catalyst for his creative pursuits and frequently brought him along on various institutional symposiums and lectures. He attended the Philips Academy, where he studied photography and forged steel sculpture. Vanderwarker obtained his Bachelor's degree in Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1971. Later in his career, he attended Harvard University Graduate School of Design and was a Loeb Fellowship recipient in 1997. 

Vanderwarker was a practicing architect before pivoting to filmmaking and photography. He worked as an assistant cameraman alongside his brother, a filmmaker. Vanderwarker then launched a successful career as an architectural photographer, publishing multiple books on architecture and city planning in Boston and forging a decades-long collaboration with Robert Campbell, a Pulitzer Prize-winning architectural critic at the Boston Globe. 

Vanderwarker has always been interested in fine art: he has drawn inspiration from Thomas Cole, the painter who saw the American landscape as the source of spiritual redemption rather than conquest. Vanderwarker traveled to study the sites depicted in Cole’s paintings and shares his admiration for nature. He travels extensively to appreciate and depict the vastly different scenery around the globe. He is known for experimenting with the idea of scale and how a two-dimensional image changes our perception and understanding of it. Vanderwarker is also captivated by optics and light, masterfully translating phenomena of fog, light reverberation, and translucent glow into prints. 

In 2004, having switched from a film camera and silver-based prints to the realm of digital, Vanderwarker mourned the loss of tactility, knowledge, and magic required to operate a darkroom. He rediscovered metalwork as a way to return to working with his hands, creating forged steel maps and small, expressive sculptures. He attended the Haystack School of Crafts to refine his knowledge and sustains a metalworking studio. 

Peter Vanderwarker has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Graham Foundation. His photographs are part of many institutional collections, including the Addison Gallery of American Art, Boston Athenaeum, Boston Public Library, and the MFA Boston.