Caterina Sartori is a Lecturer in Visual Anthropology at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology of Leiden University. Her research interests include housing and social justice movements, multimodal anthropology, and anthropological filmmaking. She is currently developing a project on life with rising extreme heat in southern Europe’s urban areas.

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Caterina Sartori is a visual and urban anthropologist lecturing in Visual Anthropology at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology of Leiden University. Her research to date has focused on the politics and aesthetics of housing in London (UK). During her post-doctorate on the High-Rise Landscapes project (University of Manchester), she researched de-cladding and remediation work on tower blocks in post-Grenfell London. As part of this project, she is currently producing a zine and a short film, to be released in late 2026.

During her doctoral research on the demolition of a council estate in London, she developed the interactive online documentary Living Room. Living Room has been selected for the Interactive Film and Media Conference 2025, the SVA Film&Media Festival 2025,  the Out of Focus exhibition at the Rautenstrauch-Joest ethnographic museum (Cologne, Germany) 2025, and for GIEFF – German International Ethnographic Film Festival 2026.  Caterina holds an MA and a PhD in Visual Anthropology from Goldsmiths (University of London).

 Her writing on the temporalities of social housing demolition and anticipatory politics has been published in The Routledge Handbook of Architecture and Anthropology (2025); on the depiction of social housing on film in Mediapolis (2021); on infrastructural failure on the Allegra Lab blog (2020). Articles on the work of repair, maintenance and expertise in mass housing are forthcoming in City – analysis of urban change, theory and action and in Anthropology in Action.

Her public-facing publications include a collaborative piece with housing campaigner Aysen Dennis and artist Alessia Gammarota, July 2024. “The Fight4Ayesbury Exhibition”. In Multi-Stories: Estate Interventions in London and Paris. Drozdz, M., Harris, A. and Telemaque, N. eds. Urban Pamphleteer #11. UCL; and a roundtable conversation, with Verstappen, S. et al., December 2021, titled “Rethinking Anthropological Film Exhibition and Distribution” published in Society for Cultural Anthropology: Fieldsights.

Caterina previously held the post of Film Officer and Film Festival Director at the Royal Anthropological Institute (2015-2023). As part of this role she programmed the RAI Film Festival, which included curating an exhibition of anthropologically informed expanded and virtual reality works (2023) and a retrospective on the filmmaker Safi Faye (2019).