ToldinCare — Simo

Simo

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Simone Klein, often known as Simo, was born in Providence, RI, and lives in Brooklyn, NY. Simo makes sculptures and performances, primarily as a poet. They are interested in mechanisms, improvisation, and bodywork -- often all merging in contexts of ritual and spiritual embodiment.

At Brown, Simo majored in Modern Culture & Media while exploring interests in economics, public health, and physics on the side.

The rest of this bio is coming soon.

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Told in Care: Birthworker Oral Histories On/Off Institutional Time

2025,
code, video

Recipient of the 2025 Kenneth Baker ‘69 Memorial Honors Prize, Brown University

Click here for the website I coded for the project.

DESCRIPTION

I’ve created a digital oral history collection of stories with BIPOC doulas in NYC. Folks discuss their calling, leaving corporate or juggling side hustles, along with births, medical trauma, and grief, media narratives about Black maternal health, ancestry, spirituality, and healing.

Doulas are integrating into the medical system like never before, institutionalized through medicaid coverage programs like the Citiwide Doula Initiative that press against the edges of what doula work IS and WHO doulas are in relationship to the broader system. While these programs broaden access to care, they replicate inequalities. Doulas contracting into these programs contend with compensation delays, certification hurdles, lack of institutional support and benefits, and the expectation to perform additional responsibilities historically assigned to state social workers.

My project is interested in how people survive within and against structural inequities by relying on each other to build alternatives. The purpose of this project is to activate the viewer’s stake not only in the movement for Black maternal health but also in the material resourcing and centering of doula practice for birthing folks. Specifically, BIPOC doulas and the anti-institutional politic and roots of the historical doula role.

thank you

teachers, time, thank you, change