Music Research Forum: Kat Nelligan – Brand Lady Gaga

Join us for the next talk  in our music research series for 2025.  The Museum will be open from 5:30pm with the talk starting at 6:00pm. Bookings encouraged.

Kat Nelligan – Brand Lady Gaga

Who is Lady Gaga and how does she connect with her fans and audiences via storytelling? In what ways does she use branding and marketing strategies to articulate how she relates to herself, and others, and to her music and artistry? These questions frame Kat Nelligan’s exploration of Lady Gaga’s branding and serve as the central focus of her 2025 book, Brand Lady Gaga, which forms the basis of this presentation.

Lady Gaga’s branding encompasses multiple facets of her identity, communicated through her music, media interviews, social media presence, and music videos. Across these mediums, Gaga shares personal stories about her mental health, her activism and philanthropic initiatives (the Born This Way Foundation), and her explicit moral and political commitments that manifest in her unwavering support for LGBTIQA+ communities and her fanbase, the ‘Little Monsters’. Furthermore, her public narrative draws on her personal history, including her upbringing, family influences, and artistic development. Through these stories, Gaga constructs a cohesive yet constantly evolving brand that is simultaneously deeply personal and strategically performative. In this way, Lady Gaga’s branding functions not merely as a marketing tool, but as a complex and dynamic form of cultural production that challenges and destabilises the fictious dichotomy between art and commerce.

Kat Nelligan is a proud Gamilaraay woman and Lecturer in Music Industry and Popular Culture in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University, Melbourne. She is the author of Brand Lady Gaga, a monograph that examines Lady Gaga’s branding as a socio-cultural phenomenon, and is a songwriter, music producer (Ableton Live), and performer who composes music under the artist name of Zaffiri. Kat’s current research interests include: music in youth justice settings; music as storytelling; music and mental health; pop stars and stardom.