Grzegorz Brzozowski obtained in 2024 a PhD at the Institute of Sociology, University of Warsaw. The dissertation “Performative Sacred. Modern festivity: between ritual and spectacle” is an analysis of the festive events developed in Poland after the transformation of 1989 in the context of sociology of religion, neo-Durkheimian cultural sociology and the aesthetics of performance.
He participated in a number of Summer Schools on the topic of religion in public life (including Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen 2010; UCSIA 2011; New School TCDS 2011). He was a Visiting researcher at Freie Universität Berlin (April-May 2012) and was a visiting graduate student at Yale University in 2013, where he was affiliated with Center for Cultural Sociology.
He works on the topic of ritual-like festive events in the contemporary Polish public sphere. His academic interests include anthropology of performance, methodologies of visual research, neo-Durkheimian sociology of religion and post-secular theories of public sphere. He has been teaching courses on these topics at University of Warsaw, Leuphana University Lüneburg and Bremen Universität. Since 2021 he is teaching a regular seminar at Universität St. Gallen, Switzerland.
His articles in English include: “Spatiality and the Performance of Belief: The Public Square and the Collective Mourning for John Paul II” (Journal of Contemporary Religion, 2013), “Clashing Temporalities of Public Mourning: Warsaw after the Death of Pope John Paul II” (TDR/The Drama Review, 2014) and “The Festival Politics of Recognition: Pluralized Ritual-like Performances of the Polish Woodstock Festival” (Journal of Ritual Studies, 2019). He is a member of the international research group “Reassembling Democracy: Ritual as Cultural Resource” organized by University of Oslo.
He also works as a documentary director, graduated from Andrzej Wajda Master School of Film Directing (2010), with a movie Today in Warsaw, Tomorrow Whatever. He participated in a number of documentary workshops (VGIK Summer School 2009, Aristoteles Workshop 2013), having his projects shown in Israel, Sweden and France (Cannes Short Film Corner). His film Brick in the Wall (2013) premiered at IDFA Festival and was nominated to Romanian National Film Awards, Gopo. His film A Stranger on my couch (2017) was awarded the Silver Hobby-Horse for Best Polish Documentary at Krakow Film Festival and received a number of awards at other festivals (e.g. Kazimierz Karabasz award of “Patient Eye” from Film Museum in Łódź). His recent project, Only day and night (2024), on the social and emotional aftermaths of 2020 pandemic quarantine, was awarded The Maciej Szumowski Award for Remarkable Social Awareness at Krakow Film Festival. The justification reads: “The film has an extraordinary sense of historical timing and sensitivity in portraying the protagonists in a situation of collective danger, whose result is an exceptionally modern and – simultaneously – universal story about every one of us.”
Since 2011, he works as an editor of Kultura Liberalna, a Polish intellectual weekly online journal, where he also published a number of interviews, film reviews and articles on the role of performative religion in Polish public sphere and pop-culture.