This paper studies the characteristic performances of a novel piezoelectric forceps actuator (PFA) that has several potential applications for minimally invasive surgery and assembly lines of semiconductor industries. The first part of the paper treats the PFA model, which is comprised of a piezoelectric slightly curved composite beam derived using Hamilton’s principle. In the latter part of the paper, the distributed transfer function method is applied to evaluate the transfer function formulation of the cantilevered PFA associated with its boundary conditions. This method will be used to resolve the radial displacements and natural frequencies of the PFA in an exact and closed-form solution, which is validated by in situ fiber optic curvature sensing measurements. The theoretical model predicted the natural frequencies of the first- and second-mode responses of the experimental quite accurately. For a cyclical low-field input, the field-induced displacement appears approximately linear, which seems comparable to the theoretical prediction and reflects primarily the converse piezoelectric effect. A cyclical high-field butterfly-shaped displacement behavior is also analogous to the behavior predicted by the model in that it demonstrates the range of validity of the linear converse piezoelectric effect without consideration of the ferroelectric domain switch effect.