Katrina Lolicato is an Australian community arts practitioner, video essayist and researcher of Sicilian, Calabrese and Abruzzese heritage, living and working across unceded Kulin Nation Country .
Trained in Archaeology and Cultural Heritage, she works across moving image, community archives and visual sociology. Her practice explores diasporic memory, cultural longing and the politics of looking. Through film and participatory cultural projects, she seeks to visually interrogate and contribute to theoretical questions relating to the study of diaspora and culture in Australia.
Her work is often collaborative and community-led. Drawing on oral history, environmental sound, sonic ethnography, home archives and orphaned visual materials, she cuts and recomposes fragments of the Australian social and cultural experience. Analogue formats, found footage and reflexive narration are used to examine how meaning is formed through place, ritual and everyday life.
Working in a style that is intentionally unrefined and occasionally kitsch, Katrina draws attention to the hierarchies of taste that separate mainstream cultural authority from Italian-diasporic visual expression. By leaning into sentiment, ornament and the handmade, she unsettles assumptions about refinement and value, allowing her to explore belonging, social justice, intergenerational transmission and mortality without smoothing over their contradictions.
She is Co-Founder of Sicilian Arts Collective Australia (2024–) and Co-Founder of Arc Up Australia (2012–) . Her work has been exhibited and screened locally and internationally, including in South Korea, the United States and across Australia .
