MIRA SIMONTON-CHAOSOME INFORMATION
Feed Overview

Mira Simonton-Chao is an artist, educator, and organizer based in the Midwest. Their current research and artistic practice focuses on institutional violence, epistemicide, weaponized data, and archives through an anti-colonial and anti-imperial framework. 

Their work against the archive has led to a practice of counter surveillance that examines the politics of place, sight, and scarcity, in which found material is used as a means of imagining abundance in the face of widespread dispossession. Through the pursuit of alternative modes of documentation and cultural preservation in collaboration marginalized and oppressed communities, they seek forms and means of memory work that do not rely on imperial and colonial tools of capture and subjugation and instead rehearse collective liberation. Their work is highly informed by the resilience of organizing movements for abolition, self-determination, and liberation in Chicago, SE Michigan, and the broader Midwest. 

Mira holds a Master of Art’s in Art Education from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA from the University of Michigan where they studied Ethnic Studies, Art History, and Ceramics.

They currently work with the following organizations:  Walls Turned Sideways, The Digs, Patric McCoy Legacy Project/Diasporal Rhythms, Groundcover News, Michigan Student Power Alliance, and NON:Opera Arts & Humanities.





MISC WORK — 
chronologically arranged 
to the best of my ability 




Keywords for an Archival Unraveling
Spring 2025

Series of 5 saddle-stitch bound pamphlets.




    Keywords for an Archival Unraveling is a love letter to the vast network of educators, researchers, and artists whose work with and against archives has influenced my own practices as a researcher, educator, and artist. It is an invitation to think critically and rigorously with others about what it means to teach with and against archives in pursuit of an archival unraveling. I hope that the ideas presented in this thesis — via my conversations with Josh MacPhee, Maria Cotera, Deirdre de la Cruz, Josh Rios, and Nicole Marroquin and my own theorizing on speculative memory work and archival fissures — may serve as invitation to others to pursue other modes of unraveling in their own teaching and learning with archives. The archive will not free us, but perhaps through its gaps, its omissions, and its fissures we may glimpse other tomorrows.