Photo: Elliott Lauren

Simona Castricum is A musician, Architecture worker, and broadcaster from NaRrm—Melbourne.

Her practice in music and architecture reimagines the tactile, virtual, and Affective relationships between bodies, space, and politics.

Simona iS a solo musician and a broadcaster on 3RRR FM and is THE design lead at D4T—Design for Trans.

Music—

Simona Castricum is a Narrm performer, producer, and radio broadcaster whose music fuses new wave, post-punk, and techno, mapping queer relationships inside utopian/dystopian urbanisms.

Emerging from Narrm’s underground music scene in the late 1990s, Simona has earned multiple award nominations, including Best Electronic Work and Best Solo Artist at the 2020 and 2024 Music Victoria Awards. Her albums Panic/Desire and SINK were long-listed for the Australian Music Prize, with SINK also earning a 2024 AIR Award nomination for Best Dance or Electronic Release. She releases music independently through her Trans-Brunswick Express label with Dinosaur City Records.

Golden Plains 2020 / Photo: Suzanne Phoenix

Simona performs live with guitarist Em Gayfer and drummer Anetta Nevin. Simona has brought her stadium sound to Golden Plains, Dark Mofo, VIVID, Sydney World Pride, and Melbourne Music Week festivals, opening for Lydia Lunch, Drab Majesty, and Peaches. Her music has been remixed by Aérea Negrot, Chiara Kickdrum, and Various Asses, and she has remixed for Courtney Barnett and Cong Josie.



She is also a broadcaster on Melbourne community radio 3RRR FM. A former DJ in Narrm’s queer and BDSM club scenes, Simona helped shape the city’s qieer club landscape, launching The Shock of the New in the late 2000s, dedicated to trans dance spaces.

In 2017, she formed the duo SaD with the late Daphne Camf. Their sole album, Saturn Rules the Material World, is a revered work that earned a Music Victoria Award nomination for Best Electronic Act in 2021 on debut.


SaD / Photo: Billie

Architecture—

Simona Castricum is a design consultant and strategic researcher in gendered spatial design, leading D4T—Design for Trans.

She works in contemporary transfeminist creative and professional methodologies. Her interdisciplinary work in architecture and music explores the intersections of bodies, space, and politics, focusing on gender, queerness, and urban conditions. Central to her work is the exploration of queer and trans awakenings and how cognitive maps shape gender-diverse worlds through what she calls “trans urban morphologies” and the interrogation of “cisnormative paradigms.” Simona reimagines urban and architectural spaces through alternative renderings by engaging with tactile, affective, and virtual conditions.

Simply Irresistible by StudioBird / SIMONA (2023)


Collaboration is a core part of Simona’s creative and intellectual process, leading to numerous exhibitions, installations, and performances that showcase her vision. With over 25 years in architectural design, Simona has extensive experience in competitions and speculative projects, contributing to prominent civic and cultural spaces. She has also held project and design roles in major architectural studios, working on key projects across Australia's urban and cultural spaces.

Her academic research informs effective practice in understanding trans and gender-diverse experiences in the built environment and administrative systems. Simona operates within a design justice practice to collaborate on policy advocating for trans and gender-diverse rights across community, industry and institutional levels. In 2024, Simona was awarded the inaugural Gender Equity and Diversity Prize by the Victorian Chapter of the Australian Institute of Architects.

Simona holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne, where she was awarded the Chancellor’s Prize and the John Grice Award for her thesis What If Safety Becomes Permanent? Architecture and Music as a Site of Transing. Her research investigates how trans-inclusive spaces are produced through architecture and music in opposition to administrative violence and cisnormative urban environments. She continues her academic work at the Melbourne School of Design, focusing on disability research and guest lecturing in urban planning and trans studies.

Installation—

Simona’s creative and conceptual work has led to notable collaborative exhibitions, installations, and performances, including SINK (with Carla Zimbler, Arts House, 2022), WAYFINDING (with George Goodnow, Science Gallery, University of Melbourne, 2023), VERS: On Pleasures, Embodiment, Kinships, Fugitivity and Re/Organising (MUMA, 2022), Who’s Afraid of Public Space? (with SIBLING, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 2022), WORKAROUND (with RMIT Design Hub, Melbourne, 2018), and When Program Is the Enemy of Function (Architecture Feminisms, KTH Sweden, 2016).


SINK w Carla Zimbler 2021 / Photo: Briony Jackson