Dr Simona Castricum

Biography

Simona Castricum is a cross-disciplinary creative and academic from Naarm—Melbourne working on Wurundjeri land of Kulin Nation. Simona engages architecture and music in a speculative ‘world-building’ practice to render queer and trans futures.

Simona’s work gathers gender nonconforming lived testimony into generous autoethnography and speculative fictions that reimagine relationships between the tactile, virtual, and affective conditions of our shared built environment.

Simona has been a design practitioner for almost thirty years. Her work as a designer, musician, academic, and public advocate for transgender equity offers an important expansion to the lens of gender and sexuality in architectural practice and design. Her research and writing develops queer and transgender epistemologies broadly across academic and professional silos.

Simona completed her PhD at the Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne in 2022—a creative practice thesis titled 'What If Safety Becomes Permanent? Music as a Site of Queering and Transing'. Her thesis examined how trans and queer space is produced through musical and architecural practice against urban conditions of cisnormativity and transphobia. Her PhD received two of the University of Melbourne’s highest accolades, the Chancellor's Prize for excellence in a PhD thesis, as well as the John Grice Research Award for excellence in architectural research at the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning.

Featured projects

simonacastricum.com