Award-winning filmmaker and producer
2025 John Jay Award Honoree
Katharina Otto-Bernstein CC’86
Katharina Otto-Bernstein CC’86, SOA’92 is a two-time Emmy-nominated filmmaker, author and producer who works in Germany and the United States.
A principal of Film Manufacturers., she is the writer/director of the forthcoming documentary feature The Last Spy. Recently she served as a producer of Joyland (Jury Prize, Cannes Film Festival; Winner of the Independent Spirit Award; Academy Award short-list 2023) and Oh, Canada (starring Richard Gere, Uma Thurman and Jacob Elordi; Cannes, 2024). Other works are The Need for Speed, Coming Home, Beautopia (Sundance), The Second Greatest Story Ever Told, Meeresleuchten, When Night falls over Moscow, Crossing the River, the German Amazon series Für Umme and the HBO documentaries Absolute Wilson (Berlinale, Art Film of the Year, Art Basel, Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures (Sundance, Berlinale, two Emmy nominations), The Price of Everything (Sundance, Emmy nomination).
Additionally, Otto-Bernstein has been nominated for Critics’ Choice Awards, GLAAD Awards, a Cinema Eye Award and has won the Silver Hugo [IFF Chicago].
She began her career as a journalist and columnist for German Vogue. She is the author of Absolute Wilson, the biography of theater director Robert Wilson, and has been a dramaturg in theater and dance (Karole Armitage: Fables on Global Warming).
In 1999 she joined the Dean’s Council of the School of the Arts and has served as chair since 2008. Under the aegis of Columbia Film School, Otto-Bernstein and her team have mentored more than 80 Columbia film students in the The Katharina Otto-Bernstein Thesis Mentorship Program, which she founded in 2014. In 2009 she was presented with a Columbia University Alumni Medal.
