Profile
Katharine Round is an artist-filmmaker with over twenty years of experience in documentary and ethnographic film. Her work explores the essence of being human with warmth and humour, creating films that are characterised by innovative approaches to filmmaking, including formal invention, the poetic use of place and time, and the construction of “situations.”
Katharine’s films have been supported by major commissioners and funders such as Netflix, the BBC, the BFI, Channel 4, Arts Council England, the Guardian and Creative Europe. They have been showcased at leading international film festivals (including Sheffield Doc/Fest, IDFA ,CPH: DOX & Cork Film Festival) and galleries (the Serpentine, the Barbican Centre, V&A).
Her work includes the critically-acclaimed The Divide (2016), which screened in over 200 cinemas and is available on Netflix; a number of film “symphonies” including Anthropocene in C Major (2021) - inspired by the idea of a “live documentary” - which headlined the interactive strand at CPH:DOX; and the upcoming hybrid documentary Ghost Town (2025), exploring myth, memory, and the construction of reality, with support from Al Jazeera, UCL, and Tohoku University.
Katharine co-founded Disobedient Films (2014), a production company that champions creative documentary, and Doc Heads (2009), a documentary screening and networking organisation. She is also an experienced educator, working as Studio Lead and Lecturer on the MA Ethnographic and Documentary Film at UCL, where she has taught since 2018.
Currently, Katharine is pursuing a PhD that builds on her established practice, focusing on collaborative filmmaking and the ethics of the filmmaker-participant relationship. Her research continues her long-standing interest in the boundaries of documentary practice and the representational strategies used in ethnographic and creative non-fiction film, aiming to expand the possibilities of documentary filmmaking and challenge conventional forms.