Simone Reynolds
Simone Reynolds (she/they) is a Black queer interdisciplinary artist, community art educator, and medicine maker from the Southside of Chicago by way of the Afrofuture. She stems from the artistic lineages of the Black churcy Hoodoo, the Chicago diaspora, and the creative technologies of her ancestors from swamps and seas. Through the transportive mediums of music, theater, writing, and media, they lure the magic in the mundane of an everyday marginalized life and people. Simone embodies the will to be well and continuance of Black femme disruptors by regarding and amplifying the experiences of the erased.
As a teaching artist, Simone challenges the carceral framework of education by creating learning spaces and curriculum that centers imagination. She has performed, facilitated, and curated creative learning experiences across the city of Chicago since teenhood. Simone spent many evenings and summers breaking bread with other youth artists and educators. Her love for community led her to participate in arts programs like the Community Actors Program, Teen Arts Council, Street Level Youth Media, and CoCre8. These rich experiences taught her about valuing the mechanics of an artistic process and collaboration. She has been afforded many opportunities to organize community arts events that invite those who are on the margins to be centered through their own creativity, including UChicago Amplify’s Youth Showcases, Sandbox Symphony, and Mobilize Creative Collaborative.
In the summer of 2020, Simone initiated at-home youth art kits that included snacks, art supplies, and prompts channeling Black radical thought and artistry. Since then, with communal support, they have distributed more than 300 art kits by delivery and through various art pop-ups with "Mobilize! Creative Blocks, Collective Dreams." She has also taught numerous workshops focusing on storytelling through visual art, movement, writing, and sound. Simone has extended compassion to Chicago’s community art scene by exploring ways to build and practice care that sustains folks beyond events and workshops. She wants people to leave spaces nourished, literally and figuratively, in their minds, bodies, and spirits.
Simone does not see her work as projects, but as threads of her legacy as an arts educator that she is weaving across the city. Teaching environmental justice and being a steward of the land has deepened Simone’s teaching practice and restored her rememory of ancestral knowledge. Watching the cycle of a plant’s life and ecology encourages them to tend to the soil of our collective approaches to how we share our stories and creative skills. Simone embraces the belief that anything and anyone can teach us something, and that the personal is political. Therefore, they understand that it is crucial for people not to abandon their personal experiences when artmaking and making meaning of the world we live in. Simone is currently working on AfroFlare Salon: A Pathway to Beauty Fugitivity, a hush harbor for Black people of marginalized genders (MaGes) living with chronic skin conditions and disabilities. She is interested in unearthing the impact of Eurocentric beauty standards, desirability politics, and anti-Blackness on Black MaGes’ relationship to their largest organ: the skin. Simone is collaborating with other artists and educators across the city who relate to this unique experience to co-create a space to find refuge within ourselves and make new liberated meanings of what beauty is to us.
Simone studied Theatre Arts and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Eastern Illinois University. While there she engaged with art and political theory, on and off stage. They have also trained and studied with Rebirth Poetry Ensemble, the Black Arts Institute (Billie Holiday Theatre) and Artist as Citizen (The Juilliard School), and the New Art School Modality. Simone’s performance credits include Rewriting the Declaration, for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf, In the Next Room, 9 to 5: The Musical, Silver Room Block Party, Lollapalooza 2020, and the Black Cube Museum. She is a featured writer and artist in Beet Street Zine’s Fall 2024 publication entitled, Food Memories.
With deep curiosity, Simone is passionate about weaving the creative arts, political education, and the spiritual arts into a web of liberation. She is a 2022 3Arts Awardee, Cecilia Weston Spiritual Academy scholar, 3rd year herbalism apprentice with Urban Growers Collective, and a 2023-2024 Climate Justice & Teaching Arts fellow with the Chicago Park District's Young Cultural Stewards. You can learn more about Simone's work here.
Profile image by: Photo by Ally Almore
Featured Artworks
Hands on the Land at Grow Greater Englewood
Photo by Ally Almore
Handcrafted herbal remedies made by Simone during the summer of 2024
Photo by Simone Reynolds
ArtSeed Ancestral Mask Workshop at Hamilton Park
Photo by Ally Elmore
ArtSeed Clay Making 2023
Mobilize Creative Collaborative
Video footage of nature play activation at the Breathing Room Gardens that was also featured in Simone's short film "mycelium."
Video by Simone Reynolds
Young Cultural Stewards (*small is all*)
Mobilize Creative Collaborative
Art Kits by Simone Reynolds.
Arts + Public Life
Art Kits by Simone Reynolds.
Photo by Alisha B
Simone Reynolds has crowd-funded a project with 3AP
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- $6,250 raised of $6,000 goal
- 0 Days 0:00:00 LEFT
Paying homage to the Black beauty shop experience as a socio-political mecca, I am inviting other Black people of marginalized genders (MaGes) to share stories around chronic skin disabilities/conditions with reflective salons. Salons are sacred spaces where we can feel …
Read more about AfroFlare Salon: A Pathway to Beauty Fugitivity