MJ KIM is an Emerging Production/Costume Designer, Photographer and Visual Artist Based in Naarm/Melbourne.
Within the film industry, MJ Kim has worked in numerous roles within the art and costume department on projects that have ended up being featured in Times Square (NYC), Sunset Boulevard (LA), NME, Rolling Stone (x3), Rage (x6), MTV Australia (x3), Beat Magazine, Fame Magazine (UK), Billboard Magazine and FilmInk (AUS). Her font illustration work for Ruel has been featured as part of his sets at Splendour in the Grass 2023, Riverfest (Thailand), and his ‘4th Wall’ World Tour. Her costume and production design work has also been featured on ten films as part of Melbourne International Film Festival’s VCA Graduate Showcase (2021, 2022 and 2023), ‘Skin Deep’ - the AACTA x Sony Pitch Competition 2023 winner, as well as films featured in Academy Awards® and BAFTA® qualifying St Kilda Film Festival and Flickerfest, amongst a number of other notable national and international film festivals across Europe and America. Her work for stage featured as part of Melbourne International Comedy Festival 2024. In 2025, the set for Forest Claudette’s ‘Everything is Green’ EP that she set dressed was nominated in the Best Production Design - Music Video category by the British Film Designers Guild.
Within the Visual Arts, MJ Kim’s work has appeared as part of the 2018 Commonwealth Games Closing Ceremony, and more recently in live music and cultural events which have been featured in Beat Magazine and Vice Australia. She has also performed spoken word poetry as part of the Commonwealth Games Festival 2018.
She has a BFA (Visual Arts) from the Victorian College of the Arts (2022).
© MJ Kim 2025
Film and
Stage
Biography
Having lived across three states on the East Coast of Australia, MJ Kim has long been captivated by the complexities of national identity and her place within the Australian zeitgeist as a first-generation Asian-Australian. From an early age, she frequented Sunday markets, antique stores, and op shops, hunting for unique vintage clothing and quirky knick-knacks. Her fascination with the stories embedded in material objects—along with the lives of those who once owned them—has greatly shaped her distinctive visual sensibility and personal aesthetic. She is interested in archiving her life and the lives of others, oral histories and the mundane reminders of those histories. MJ Kim is especially drawn to the “in-between” and interdisciplinary, finding beauty in nuance and seeking to infuse it into everything she creates.
She has worked on one-of-a-kind projects, such as one of Australia’s first films designed for a VR headset and a one-shot short film. She continues to look forward to a whole life’s worth of exciting projects.
Visual Arts
Biography
MJ Kim’s visual arts practice is influenced by the idea that by looking at society’s discarded objects, one is best able to learn about the culture and individuals around us. As such, her work utilises mediums such as found wood and objects, acrylic, photography, collage and wheat-pasting to deconstruct and reconstruct her own psycho-geographic experiences within Melbourne’s subcultural scene and sexual relationships, as well as pay homage to the ‘punk’ ethos. It is this essence of ‘rip it up and start again’ that best reflects her approach both to making and subject.