Natalia Hoffmann

Natalia will be presenting "New era of  branding solutions: Merging Semiotics with Cognitive Sciences" - 4th June

When Natalia was five years old and all her girlfriends wanted to become princesses when they grew up, Natalia had other exciting ideas. She was either gonna be a pirate, a Russian – American double spy, or a detective. Alas, the career of a spy failed at the onset, as Natalia’s neither Russian nor American. Becoming a pirate turned out equally unachievable, for she gets seasick from merely looking at a passing ship.

Instead, Natalia boarded a plane going from her native Krakow in Poland to London in England. There she took her BA in Media and Communications at Goldsmiths University with the idea of joining the branding and advertising industry after graduation. The first academic essay she wrote dealt with the subject of semiotics and got published on the Goldsmiths University’s internal server. It serves as an example for other students on how to write and think about modern culture with a fresh and innovative approach. From then onwards Natalia’s interest in semiotics has deepened progressively and the link between semiotics and advertising became apparent. All the more so when she started working as a branding consultant.

However, it wasn’t the classical semiotics school of thought that captivated Natalia. The missing part of the signs-and-meaning puzzle was to be found in studying human cognition at large; that is the neurobiological properties of human bodies that are involved in production and interpretation of sign systems. Natalia completed an elite MA degree in Cognitive Semiotics at Aarhus University in Denmark, working as a laboratory research assistant in the meantime. Given her interest in branding, her Master thesis’s title is “New: Cognitive Semiotics for Neurobranding”.

As a Cognitive Semiotician Natalia’s a bit like a detective – on a constant mission to draw on the knowledge of human strategies of meaning making, while working in the field of research, analysis and deduction. Natalia conducted semiotic research in Estonia and in Denmark. She now lives in Berlin.

Natalia loves to present at Semiofest because...

Since my initials are in the middle of the chemical transcript of love, I feel I have no choice but to present at Semiofest in Paris. C’est la vie, oui. Love proudly representing. Other than that, my affinity for Cognitive Semiotics, spreading ideas and broadening my own horizons is endless. I am equally fond of what Semiofest is all about.