Sophie Aimée Hartleib studied Film Studies and French at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz and Freie Universität Berlin. In 2021 she received an MA in Visual Anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. From 2021 until 2023 she worked as a research assistant for Prof. Dr. Sabine Nessel at the division for Film Studies at Freie Universität Berlin.

Since October 2023 she is a PhD candidate at the EXC 2020 "Temporal Communities" (Research Area 2: "Travelling Matters") and the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School for Literary Studies. In her dissertation "On Credits and Debts: Black Filmwork in 1940s Hollywood", which is part of the research project "Rest of Cast: Film Credits as Spatiotemporally Dynamic Assemblies", she looks at the gaps and fissures of film credits along the racial lines of classical Hollywood. Drawing on authors such as Saidiya Hartman, Tina Campt and Fred Moten she considers these missing film credits as debts within the wider context of the long afterlife of transatlantic slavery. 

Current research includes an EXC 2020 doctoral research project On Credits and Debts: Black Filmwork in 1940s Hollywood.