He has directed Hollywood movies such as White Oleander and television films like Warriors, The Government Inspector, The Promise, Wolf Hall and The State.

On graduation in 1980, he joined the staff of the BBC in London as a general trainee, alongside Kevin Lygo (now head of studios at ITV), Dominic Cameron (former managing director of ITV.com) and Peter Salmon (former Controller of BBC1).

Programmes at YTV included The Falklands War: The Untold Story, a two-hour documentary made with Michael Bilton to mark the 5th anniversary of the Argentine invasion of the islands.

In 1995, Kosminsky was fired from YTV by incoming managing director Bruce Gyngell and set up his own company, Stonehenge Films Ltd, to act as a vehicle for his television dramas.

[6] In 1999, Kosminsky teamed up with writer Leigh Jackson[7] and producer Nigel Stafford-Clark to make Warriors (1999), a two-part drama for BBC Television which told the harrowing story of the first British peacekeeping deployment to central Bosnia in 1992-3.

[8] Starring the at the time unknown actors Ioan Gruffudd, Matthew Macfadyen and Damian Lewis, the films were shown on BBC1 to considerable acclaim.

[13] It was transmitted in the UK on Channel 4 on 17 March 2005 and won a series of awards including BAFTAs for Best Single Drama, Best Actor (Mark Rylance) and Best Writer (Kosminsky).

[15] Transmitted on Channel 4 as part of their 25th anniversary celebrations on 30 and 31 October 2007, the films won Best Drama Serial of 2007 at BAFTA and at the Royal Television Society.

Eight years in the making, it tells the story of British soldiers stationed in Palestine during the Mandate period 1945–1948 and the impact of those events on the current situation in Israel/Palestine.

[22] Kosminsky has directed two feature films, Wuthering Heights (1992), (with (Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche), for Paramount Pictures[citation needed] and White Oleander (2002), (with Michelle Pfeiffer, Renée Zellweger, Robin Wright Penn and Alison Lohman), for Warner Bros.[23] He has been a member of the Policy Council of Liberty, the campaigner for human rights,[24] a past Council member of BAFTA, a Fellow of the Royal Television Society, a founding board member of Directors UK,[25] (the body representing working film and TV directors in the United Kingdom) and a winner of the BAFTA Alan Clarke Award for Outstanding Creative Contribution to TV.

[26] Based on the Booker Prize winning novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel, the six-part serial was written by Peter Straughan and stars Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell, Damian Lewis as King Henry VIII and Claire Foy as Queen Anne Boleyn.

[40] Writing about the season in the Daily Telegraph, Jasper Rees wrote "Peter Kosminsky has earned that rare accolade for a director of television drama: a retrospective at the BFI".

On 8 May 2016, after Wolf Hall won Best Drama Series at the 2016 British Academy Television Awards, Kosminsky, who directed the show, made a speech about defending the BBC and Channel 4 from government interference.