Dr Simone O’Callaghan is a practicing artist who has exhibited in the UK, Australia, China and Canada. Her work is interdisciplinary, combining new technologies with analogue artforms. In 2012, she was awarded an art practice-based PhD at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, University of Dundee.

Simone's creative practice and research is interdisciplinary and centres on the relationships between the digital and the physical, particularly in relation to technologically mediated presence, experience design, and the ways in which new technologies can be used to preserve heritage, traditions and non-digital art practices. Through making creative works for exhibition in both conventional galleries and less conventional public spaces, she takes a meta-cognitive approach, reflecting on art and design practice-based methods as rigorous academic inquiry in the context of, and to challenge, more traditional research cultures. In addition to doing research that is creative artefact based, Simone also examines the adaptation of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and social science methods, in the areas of ethnography and visual sociology to understand participant/ audience/ user perceptions of art, design and interactive media.

Simone has successfully been awarded funding for her work, both in group bids such as £1.39M from the UK Research Council's Digital Economy fund for the three year TOTeM Research project (group of 6) and as an individual artist from bursaries such as the William Sangster Fund and the Scottish Arts Council. She has presented her work to audiences at international events such as Europrix, the European Academy of Design (EAD) and the International Symposium for Art & Design (ISEA).

Simone came to academia from industry where she was a senior designer/ art director for interactive and print projects with clients such as Novell (Australia), The Australian Tourist Commission, Teletext UK, and Young Scot.