Sandra Ladwig has been working at the Department of Media Theory, University of Applied Arts Vienna since October 2016. She is currently writing her PhD thesis on leisure in Austrian amateur films as a phenomenon of modernity. Her research is financed by the Austrian Academy of Sciences as part of the DOC-team-project Doing Amateur Film. Social and Aesthetic Practices in Austrian Amateur Films between the 1920s and the 1980s. In her research Sandra Ladwig conceives amateur film as a practice that is temporally configured and constituted as leisure activity in itself as well as by the leisure activities depicted in the films.

Due to the historiographic potential of these long-neglected films, recently interest has increased in the variety of amateur films — from home movies to travel films and ambitious amateur fiction films — not only in cultural and film studies but also in the work of archives. Amateur film research is an interdisciplinary field that locates aesthetic practices in technological improvements, professional and experimental film productions and how-to manuals. This reappraisal serves as the methodological background in which amateur film is explored as a social and aesthetic practice, referring to its artistic modes of appropriation and adaptation as well as its contingencies.

In February 2015 Sandra Ladwig completed the Diploma Programme in theatre, film and media studies at the University of Vienna with a thesis on amateur films of the 1930s and 1940s, which are in the archive of the Austrian Film Museum.

Since 2014 she collaborates on plays and events staged at the Odeon Theatre Vienna (P a R a D i S o, ANAGÓ, … AM ABEND DER AVANTGARDE, Wiener Festwochen, Impulstanz). From 2011 to 2015 she worked as an assistant at the Austrian Central Library for Physics and Chemistry Library.