On Making It: Katie Burrell, Comic Creative Genius
Katie's responsible for smash hits that are blowing open the doors of elitist outdoor culture. But success doesn't always come wrapped in tidy bows.
Welcome to On Making It, a new column on The Wilder Path. From the outside, it can look like the people who’ve “made it” are the lucky ones: successful, financially secure, well-known, with the coolest jobs in the most coveted towns, or always off on the next amazing adventure. They’re living their dreams.
But that outside perspective rarely shows the path those admired people took to get to these peak moments, or are currently walking to stay at that perceived peak. Often those paths weren’t easy—still aren’t—or were barricaded in setbacks. Often it’s the setbacks themselves that motivated the journey in the first place.
On Making It is the inside story on how successful people have come to achieve something coveted in current culture, and what advice they can offer us in walking our own paths.
I’m thrilled to kick off this column with the creative, hilarious, ever-dynamic Katie Burrell.
Katie seems to be able to do it all: she’s a stand-up comic, writer, director, and actress, famous for smartly roasting too-serious tropes in outdoor culture. She made her film debut with Influencer, a spoof on an aspiring social media star; then moved on to Dream Job, a comedy documentary featuring all women that transcended the ski film genre; and has made dozens of short clips in between that blow the gates into usually elitist and hard-core outdoor culture wide open. Her particular humor taps into themes far beyond just outdoor activities—like these takes on relationship dynamics in skiing, camping, mountain biking, and fly fishing—that finally lets the everyday person see themselves in outdoor and adventure culture. And it resonates; she’s racked up 100,000 followers on Instagram.
When I saw Katie last November, she looked to be on a high. She was debuting her feature film, Weak Layers, which satirizes ski town life, at the Banff Film Festival. From there, Weak Layers would head to major theaters through the same company that brought Alex Honnold’s rock climbing film Free Solo into the mainstream consciousness.
But when I asked her about what appears to be this peak moment in her career, she offered some bare honesty, that I admire so much, and that we all need in this era of 24/7 connection and constant public curation. “I’m actually the most financially strapped I’ve been since 2020,” she told me.
Katie was so focused on getting her first feature under her belt—which she wrote, directed, and starred in—that she put a good amount of her own resources, including financial, into the making and promotion of it. “I knew it would benefit me in the long run. But that long run hasn’t shown up yet,” she said. In fact, she’s seeing less income than she did three years ago. “I’ve had a hard time going from this perception of all this outward success to just getting work flowing again.”
Before landing a production assistant job in July, Katie found herself in the frustrating liminal space that many of us know well but often don’t talk about: colleagues weren’t reaching out with work because they assumed Katie was too busy and too expensive in the wake of all that outward success. She’d worked so hard to get to where she was, and yet was thrust back into the position of needing to take whatever work came to her—at the same time she aspires to her next big vision of breaking into mainstream comedy television and film.
When I asked her what advice she might offer to people in similar situations, she was also refreshingly honest. “I haven’t been managing my burnout well. I’m in a position where I can’t take downtime, or spend the money on a therapist to talk through it all in a serious way. I have had lots of success, yes. I’m just in this place of massive transition.”
We like to think that success comes wrapped up in bows, tidy and definitive. But maybe, as Katie and I also discussed, the idea of success is, for ambitious people, always a moving target—which makes it impossible to pin down long enough to wrap up in a bow.
Thank you to Katie for the gift of honesty. Go give her a follow. I know I’m always in need of a good laugh, and few people can deliver like Katie Burrell.