Simone Barros

Simone Barros creates films, plays, soundscapes and installations which breach the boundaries of solipsism to embark upon a symbiosis between the self and the other, between the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious to shatter these superficial binaries. In her filmmaking practice, distance and time become the material in the passing of temporal moments and traversal of spatial movements.

The 8th Floor by Shelley and Donald Rubin (2023), MONO XVI Cinematic Arts Festival (2022), Cosmic Rays Film Festival (2023), Cleveland International Film Festival (2019) and Chagrin Documentary Film Festival (2019) have screened Simone’s short experimental films. Third Coast International Audio Festival featured Simone’s soundscape in their 2020 Third Place Audio Festival Workshop and On Air Festival 2021 Official Selections included Simone’s audio drama. Cleveland Public Theatre produced Simone’s devised 10-minutes play, “Fail,” one act play, “The Forest Court,” staged a reading of her full length play, “Dating Godfrey,” and commissioned Simone to direct the short documentary film, “Station Hope: A Conversation.”

Simone has worked for the 68th Flaherty Film Seminar and for filmmakers Judith Helfand, Sam Pollard, Spike Lee and Charlie Kaufman. She delights in directing audiobooks including works by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Carolyn Forché, Hari Kunzu, Kate Folk, Ibram X. Kendi and Naomi Klein.

UnionDocs selected Simone as a fall 2023 Live/Work-in-Progress Resident. Arts Cleveland awarded Simone a 2016 Creative Workforce Fellowship and grant for the development of her short nonfiction film, “What Remains.”

Simone earned her MFA at Duke University where she served as a 2022 Duke Flaherty Fellow, a David and Elizabeth Roderick Scholar, received a Dean Research Award (2022 + 2023) and earned her BFA at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts receiving the Martin Scorsese Post-Production Grant, Dean Craft Award and 20th Century Fox Benjamin L. Hooks Scholarship. Later, NYU Tisch awarded Simone with a Tisch Alumni Microgrant for the production of her dramatic writing reading series.