Emily Simons is a cultural worker in hot pursuit of authentic storytelling tools and layered visual narratives that both clarify and complicate what we’re up against and the work we do together in movement. After many years of full-throttle grassroots cross-pollination and artist wrangling with the Maine-based Beehive Design Collective’s The True Cost of Coal and ¡Mesoamerica Resiste! projects, Emily now lives in Pittsburgh, PA, where she’s experimenting with new ways to make useful pictures. In the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, Emily collaborated on Agitarte’s epic End the Debt! Decolonize! Liberate! scroll, which tells a story of struggle and resistance to U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico and its diaspora. As an illustrator, designer, graphic recorder, animator, and content-visualization wizard, she’s supported and strengthened organizing and political education efforts by movement groups including Southerners on New Ground, Mijente, Rising Majority, Interrupting Criminalization, Grassroots Global Justice, Media Justice, Sunrise Movement, Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective, Advancement Project, Rising Tide North America, me too, Women’s March, and more. She recently art-directed the 21st century feminist organizing curriculum We Don’t Want to Be Stars and is the illustrator and designer for the 2021 Berta Cáceres International Feminist Organizing School. Emily is always looking to get into good trouble with new comrades and is shy on the internet. Reach her at [email protected] for work samples and human-scale collaborative scheming!