Music—

Simona Castricum is a songwriter, producer, spatial innovator, and sonic archivist, creating blends of old-school flavours; new wave, post-punk, through electro, new beat, techno and house. She connects her lived synth energies from the 70s HiNRG and 80s new wave through the 90s sheds into today’s underground, mapping queer relationships within utopian and dystopian urbanisms.


Emerging from Narrm’s underground scene in the late ’90s, she began DJing and performing under the moniker Fluorescent, debuting in 2001, playing clubs including Q&A and Meccanoid, and performing alongside Ladytron. In 2009, she went on to host regular club night The Shock of the New at The Order of Melbourne (now Miscellania) and The Gasometer, later forming her second band, Ana Nicole.

Simona began her solo career in 2013. Over five albums, she has received multiple Music Victoria Award nominations for Best Solo Artist and Best Electronic Act. Her albums Panic/Desire and SINK were longlisted for the Australian Music Prize. Panic/Desire debuted at number one on the AIR 100% Independent Charts through her label Trans-Brunswick Express. SINK received a 2024 AIR Award nomination for Best Dance/Electronic Release.

Simona is known for anthems ‘Supertouch’ (ft. m8riarchy), ‘Grateful for the Heartache’, and ‘The Poets of Antiquity’ with SaD.



She collaborates to release music independently through her studio, Trans-Brunswick Express. TBE exists to amplify trans musicians from Australia building community capacity in trans-led physical publishing, structured release strategy and long-term creative infrastructure. She works with acts LXRP and Light Transmissions.

As a duo with drummer Anetta Nevin (Dianas, Cars That Ate Paris), Simona drives guitar over synths and drum machines. She’s played Golden Plains, Dark Mofo, VIVID, Sydney World Pride, and Melbourne Music Week, supporting Peaches, Drab Majesty, Lydia Lunch, and !!!. Simona has worked with Aérea Negrot, Jorge Elbrecht, Courtney Barnett, Sui Zhen, Chiara Kickdrum, Various Asses and Hydra Fashion Week, Cong Josie, Pillow Pro, Adored and Nite Fruit.


In 2017, she formed SaD with the late Daphne Camf. Opening for Moon Duo in 2020, they released Saturn Rules the Material World (2021), Daphne and Simona’s haunting and lone epitaphic offering, which garnered a Music Victoria Award nomination for Best Electronic Act.

Broadcast/DJ—

Simona is a broadcast DJ on Narrm commmunity radio 3RRR, championing intergenerational, genre-bending underground and queer music for drive-time.

A former club DJ, Simona launched The Shock of the New—a trans dance space dedicated to electronic music in 2008. She has worked to establish trans musical communities in Narrm, connecting techno, house, and electro styles across the eras. Through radio, Simona trained at 3PBS, and has since curated shows for Sky-Lab and NTS Radio.

She’s featured at major festivals Strawberry Fields, Pitch renegades, Sydney Mardi Gras, to the underground clubs of Australia’s south-east; Wax’o Paradiso, Confide, Fantastic, XOXO, Pleasure Planet, Club 77, Monsta Gras, Pink Bubble, Control, Bunker, Death Disco, Trough, John, Closet, Tomboy, Abode, Meccanoid, and Q&A.

Architecture—

Simona Castricum works in gendered spatial design, transfeminist methodologies, and design justice through her research project D4T.



Her practice explores transgender and cisnormative typologies, and the spaces in between, revealing how architecture and urbanism shape trans experiences—and how trans people, in turn, reshape space itself.


In 2022, Simona was awarded the University of Melbourne Chancellor’s Prize and the Melbourne School of Design John Grice Award for her Architecture PhD thesis, What If Safety Becomes Permanent: Architecture & Music as a Site of Transing. The research examined musical event architectures as active sites of queer and trans spatial production, mapping how these environments generate archives of affect and urban morphologies in resistance to dominant cisnormative regimes of administrative violence.

She is a member of the Australian Institute of Architects Victorian Gender Equity and Diversity Committee. In 2024, she received the inaugural Gender Equity & Diversity Prize from the Australian Institute of Architects (Vic Chapter). Simona has worked across policy, arts, educational and institutional sectors, including all-gender bathroom reform with the Australian Building Codes Board; the Baillieu Library Special Collections redevelopment at the University of Melbourne with ARM; Arts Centre Melbourne’s redevelopment with NH Architecture; and the Best Practice Guidelines for Live Music Venues with Music Victoria.

Graphics—

Simona Castricum’s graphic design studio operates under the moniker SPRGRFKA; graphic design as spatial, tactile, and world-forming.

Typography, collage, illustration, diagram, image applications, and 3D are approached as inhabited artefacts, experienced at a human scales through proximity, repetition, and use, physically encountered in print or on screens.


The work centres on the reimagination of familiar objects and ubiquitous graphics. By using recognisable typologies and iconographies, SPRGRFKA conjures equivocal, queer readings within everyday media. Simona intervenes in the familiar, embedding difference into the visual languages that shape daily life.

SPRGRFKA works at the crease of analogue and digital technologies, recovering tactile ways of sensing, making, and reading abandoned in contemporary media. Working across publishing, installation, music, and identity systems, SPRGRFKA approaches graphic design architecturally: meaning structured as environment, typography functioning as relational across architectural, installation, and musical creations.

Exhibition—

Simona Castricum’s installations explore the affective, tactile, and virtual conditions of trans spatial production.

Her conceptual and curatorial work has led to collaborations across exhibitions, symposiums, installations, performances, and mentorships; fostering national and global creative connections including; Reimagining Fellowship (AIA Vic/Melbourne Design Week), Industry Muscle: Five Scores for Architecture (curated by Teo Ala-Ruona & Kaisa Karvinen for the Nordic Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale), Simply Irresistible (NGV Architecture Commission Design Competition with Studiobird), WAYFINDING (with George Goodnow, Science Gallery), Who’s Afraid of Public Space? (curated by SIBLING, ACCA), SINK (with Carla Zimbler, Arts House), Lightning in the Middle (by Dr. Bon Mott), More Than Bathrooms (Melbourne School of Design, Melbourne Design Week), and When Program is the Enemy of Function (Architecture Feminisms, AHRA/KTH Sweden).
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Images—
Portrait: Darien Gomes / Live: Duncographic / SaD w Daphne Camf: Billie / Strawberry Fields 2024: Edd Schlaghecke / Simply Irresistible w Studiobird: Patrick Hamilton / SINK w Carla Zimbler: Briony Jackson