Catarina Valdigem obtained a Doctorate in Media and Communications from Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2016. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Human Sciences at the Catholic University of Portugal, where she lectures students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Prior to her current position, she taught in the School of Media and Communications at the Polytechnic Institute of Lisbon from 2017 to 2018, and in the media and communications department at Goldsmiths from 2010 to 2016.

From 2022 to 2024, she worked as a research assistant in the exploratory Project titled "Censura(s): um modelo analítico de processos censórios" / "Censhorship(s): an analytical model of the censoring processes" under the leadership of Dr. Rita Luís and Dr. Rui Lopes at the Contemporary History Institute, New University of Lisbon (2022-2023). From 2018 to 2022, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the project "Broadcasting in the Portuguese Empire: Nationalism, Colonialism, Identity" under the supervision of Dr. Nelson Ribeiro. The project was conducted at the Research Centre in Communication and Culture, which is part of the Faculty of Human Sciences at UCP. In 2018, she obtained a brief fellowship to carry out research in the project "The Portuguese Colonial Empire and the Urban Popular Culture," which was co-led by Dr. Nuno Domingos (ICS-UL) and Dr. Elsa Peralta (CEC-FLUL). From 2012 to 2014, she was a research associate in the project "Media Reception and Memory: Female Audiences in the New State" under the leadership of Dr. José Ricardo Carvalheiro (UBI). Additionally, from 2004 to 2006, she worked as a research fellow in the project "TV and the Images of Difference" under the coordination of Dr. Isabel Ferin Cunha (CIC. Digital/University of Coimbra).

Catarina has written about the portrayal of elderly and gendered minorities on television, telenovelas, and the way people use and appropriate television prime-time content. With José Ricardo Carvalheiro, she published a women's historical reception study of radio and television in twentieth-century Portugal. While working with Nuno Domingos and Elsa Peralta, she conducted a historical reception of music and radio in colonial Mozambique among Portuguese and Mozambicans of Goan origins, having published on the subject. More recently, she has worked with Rogério Santos on the history of colonial broadcasting in Angola, and both published on the disruptive role of the radio professional Sebastião Coelho in constructing a new Angolan-ness sound project. She is currently researching the censoring practices in colonial broadcasting in Mozambique and the trans/intermedial circuits of South-Asian soundscapes in that former colony. Her current work also examines the historical reception of sound, encompassing broadcasts and music, including rebellious forms, in Angola and Mozambique during the late colonial era. She is also particularly interested in understanding the contours of Lusophone colonial legacies in contemporary postcolonial subjectivities and bodily practices.