OLIVIA J. BENNETT


I’m an arts writer, researcher and critic based in Brisbane, Australia.

My work examines how digital culture, new media art, film and sound shape contemporary experience through futurology, incongruity and absurdity. I track how aesthetic movements absorb, resist or mutate alongside technological and economic shifts, often through fragmentation, multiplicity and nonlinear forms that mirror media saturation’s effect on perception and meaning.

Beyond writing, I’ve worked across programming, digital production and major cultural projects in Australia’s film and music industries. In 2019 I participated in the Melbourne International Film Festival’s Critics Campus and in 2020 I was part of Gertrude Contemporary’s Emerging Writers Program.

I also work as a freelance copywriter, content writer and strategist. With over five years of freelancing, three years in agency environments and two years navigating Melbourne’s strictest COVID-19 lockdowns, I’ve built a sharp adaptability—crafting strategy and storytelling across diverse industries. If you’d like to see my portfolio, shoot me an email.

I hold a BA in Art History and Curating from Monash University, majoring in Film Studies. My first-class Honours thesis at Melbourne University examined how the films of Harvard University’s Sensory Ethnography Lab function as object-oriented cinema, aligning with Timothy Morton’s concept of hyperobjects. Through this lens I explored how their films destabilise human-centred narratives, attune audiences to the nonhuman and engage with the inescapable entanglements of contemporary existence.


Open to new projects, commissions and creative collaborations—if you’re working on something interesting, let’s talk!



SIREN SONGS

Sacred Hearts




This debut EP delivers devilish post-punk with a nod to the waterways and wayward ways of a not-so Sunshine State. Opener ‘Is It Cold?’ cuts through mist and mud, with heavy power chords and a wall of wails slicing through chilling synths and a relentless drumbeat. In ‘Concrete Bikini’, Ophelia is invoked as the protagonist sinks into the Enoggera Reservoir: “Seduced by the murky brown water/So I let it sink into me, I knew my fate.” Drawing from The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees and Joy Division, yet remaining distinctly their own, the tracks revel in a timeless tug-of-war between so-called good and evil. ‘Virgin/Whore’ twists the complexities of feminine experience into a swampy death roll. Meanwhile, ‘Crocodile Tears’ picks up the pace, closing the EP with an industrial Prodigy-like rage: “Take the silver spoon from your mouth/Replace it with tetanus and rust.” The EP’s pulsing, tachycardic heart thrums with raw cathartic energy–like an electric shock for those ready to ignite their rebellion.