Hortense Powdermaker (1896-1970) was an anthropologist best known for her ethnographic studies of African Americans in rural America and of Hollywood.

Born in Philadelphia to a Jewish family, Powdermaker spent her childhood in Reading, Pennsylvania and in Baltimore. She studied history and the humanities at Goucher College and later enrolled in courses at the London School of Economics. Powdermaker became a graduate student under anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, who convinced her to embark on a course of doctoral studies. While at the LSE, Powdermaker also worked under and was influenced by other well known anthropologists such as A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, E. E. Evans-Pritchard and Raymond Firth .

Powdermaker completed her PhD on leadership in "primitive" society in 1928. Like her contemporaries, Powdermaker sought to identify her anthropological work with a "primitive" people and spent ten months conducting fieldwork among the Lesu in Melanesia. After returning to the United States, Powdermaker decided to apply ethnographic field methods to the study of communities in her own society. She conducted what was probably the first such anthropological study in an African American community in Mississippi from 1932-1934.

In 1950, Powdermaker published Hollywood, the Dream Factory , the first, and to date, the only substantial anthropological study of the American film industry.

In 1968, Hortense Powdermaker retired from Queens College, where she had founded the department of anthropology and sociology, and moved to Berkeley, where she remained engaged in ethnographic fieldwork. She died two years later of a heart attack.