Hi, I'm Katharina. I work in independent film production at the Hamburg-based company Tamtam Film. A cultural sociologist by training, I'm enthusiastic about fostering a community of film creatives who pursue ambitious ideas with heart, humor, and a critical eye. My interests partly root in my research on artistic identity formation and social networks among filmmakers. These ideas have appeared in international scientific journals, among them Sociological Science, Poetics, Socius, and Applied Network Science.

I have also worked as a data scientist on diverse projects inside and outside the cultural sector. I find the potential of AI in filmmaking fascinating, while remaining critical of its impact on human creativity and social inequality. 


I hold a Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Economic and Social Sciences at the University of Mannheim. During my doctoral training, I was a visiting scholar at Columbia University in New York. My studies were supported by the German Academic Exchange Service and the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. I've presented my research at various conferences across Europe and the US and initiated and co-organized a number of workshops on the intersection of culture and social networks. My teaching portfolio includes courses on Cultural Sociology, Social Network Analysis, and Statistics for Social Scientists.

I've written about the emergence of AUTEUR CINEMA in NEW HOLLYWOOD

Burgdorf, K., & Hillmann, H. (2024). Identity from symbolic networks: the rise of New Hollywood. Sociological Science, 11(Article a12), 297-339.

Burgdorf, K., Wittek, M., & Lerner, J. (2024). Communities of Style: Artistic Transformation and Social Cohesion in Hollywood, 1930 to 1999. Socius, 10.


STATUS INEQUALITY among filmmakers

Burgdorf, K. (2024). Artistic referencing and emergent standards of peer recognition in Hollywood, 1930–2000. Poetics, 103, 101887.

Wittek, M., & Burgdorf, K. (2025). Networks and Artistic Status Orders in Cultural Fields: The Evolution of Hollywood Filmmaking. Poetics, 110, 101985.


GENDER INEQUALITY in the global film festival sector

Ehrich, M. E., Burgdorf, K., Samoilova, Z., & Loist, S. (2022). The film festival sector and its networked structures of gender inequality. Applied Network Science, 7(1), 20. 


and CREATIVE APPROACHES to large-scale data collection, artificial intelligence, and social network analysis

Burgdorf, K., & Hillmann, H. (2021). Archival data. In Research Handbook on Analytical Sociology (pp. 337-351). Edward Elgar Publishing.

Shelby, R., Srinivasan, R., Burgdorf, K., Lena, J. C., & Rostamzadeh, N. (2024). Creative ML Assemblages: The Interactive Politics of People, Processes, and Products. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 8(CSCW1), 1-30.

Jones, P., & Burgdorf, K. (2025). Film networks. In Handbook of Culture and Social Networks (pp. 139-153). Edward Elgar Publishing.