Simona Nastac is a curator, critic and poet born in space. Living in London.  She studied Art History and Theory in Bucharest and holds an MA in Creative Curating from Goldsmiths University, London. Committed to socio-critical art and context responsive practices, she is forever looking for unexpected outcomes able to shake the world. In a gentle way.

She has curated exhibitions and live poetry events in London, Seoul, New York, Berlin, Saint Petersburg, Prague, Shanghai, Cluj and Bucharest, which featured renowned artists Anish Kapoor, Hito Steyerl, Tony Cragg,  Nigel Rolfe, Christian Bök, Jaap Blonk, and Dan Perjovschi, amongst others. She has also written numerous reviews for art magazines such as Flash Art, Eikon, Springerin, Praesens, IDEA Cluj, Cultural Observer and ARTA Bucharest. From July 2006 to December 2013 she was Head of Arts at the Romanian Cultural Institute in London. Since 2017 she has been the curator of the International Artist Residency In Context in the Lynchian town of Slănic Moldova.

In 2017 she published The Depressing Colour of Honey (Tracus Arte, Bucharest), which won the Alexandru Mușina Prize “The King of the Morning” for poetry debuts. The volume was also shortlisted for the “George Bacovia” National Debut Prize in 2018. She has performed at the European Poetry Festival London & Manchester, Conway Hall (London), Vilnius Book Weekend, and various venues in Romania, including the famed Max Blecher Institute. Since 2016 she has been the curator of the Experimental Poetry Night at the Bucharest International Festival of Poetry.

Her poetry has been translated from Romanian to English, English to Romanian, and Romanian to Romanian by herself, sometimes with the aid of Google Translate, always with great results, never the same. Also to Russian and Spanish. Her work has been featured in Asymptote Journal, Poesis International, Harana Poetry,  Why Now, Eunoia Review , Apricity Press, Black Bough Poetry (Deep Time: Volume 2),  Tears in the Fence, and the Europoe anthology (Kingston University Press, 2019) among others.

Areas of interest: everything at the intersection of art, poetry, ecology and social justice. Even if such an intersection might not exist.