Katharina Burgdorf

Hi, I'm Katharina. I work in independent film production at the Hamburg-based firm Tamtam Film. A cultural sociologist by training, I am 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 relational dynamics among teams of film creatives. These ideas have appeared in the scientific journals Sociological Science, Poetics, Socius, and Applied Network Science.

I have also worked as a data scientist on various 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. From September 2021 until April 2022, I was a visiting scholar at Columbia University in New York. From October 2023 until September 2024, I was a Postdoctoral Researcher in Sociology at the University of Bremen. My studies were supported by the German Academic Exchange Service and the German Academic Scholarship Foundation.

I've written about the emergence of US-American auteur cinema and their community formation...

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.

. inequality in filmmakers' peer recognition

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

. 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.

. & creative perspectives on large-scale data collection and artificial intelligence

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.