MJ KIM is an Emerging Production/Costume Designer, Photographer and Visual Artist Based in Naarm/Melbourne.
Within the film industry, MJ Kim has held numerous roles across the art and costume departments on projects that have gone on to be 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 showcased in his sets for Splendour in the Grass 2023, Riverfest (Thailand), and his ‘4th Wall’ World Tour.
Her costume and production design work has appeared in ten films for the Melbourne International Film Festival’s VCA Graduate Showcase (2021, 2022, and 2023), in ‘Skin Deep’ — the AACTA x Sony Pitch Competition 2023 winner, and in films screened at Academy Awards® and BAFTA®–qualifying festivals including St Kilda Film Festival and Flickerfest, alongside numerous other notable national and international festivals across Europe and America. Her stage work was also featured in the Melbourne International Comedy Festival 2024.
In 2025, the set for Forest Claudette’s ‘Everything is Green’ EP, which she set dressed, received a nomination for Best Production Design – Music Video by the British Film Designers Guild. Most recently, two films she contributed to — across graphics and production design — have been up for consideration for the 2026 AACTA Awards.
Within the visual arts, MJ Kim’s work was featured in the 2018 Commonwealth Games Closing Ceremony, and in live music and cultural events covered by Beat Magazine and Vice Australia. She has also performed spoken word poetry as part of the Commonwealth Games Festival 2018.
Additionally, MJ Kim has both written for and been featured in Beat Magazine, and she continues to make media appearances discussing her advocacy for the Australian film industry and the preservation of physical media.
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.