Ahya Simone

After college Simone sought out ways to perform outside her previous experience "playing 300-year-old dead people music, and being around all these white suburban kids who had access I never did, who’d been playing classical music since they were two years old."[1] She began to cover r&b and soul music, and named Dorothy Ashby as one of her biggest influences.[4] This led her to collaborate with fellow Detroiter dream hampton, to score hampton's short film Treasure (2018).[1] Simone received a Kresge Artist Fellowship in 2018 and was the first Black trans woman recipient.[5] That year she also teamed up with Kelela on Take Me a_Part, the Remixes.[1]

In addition to her work as a harpist, Simone is a singer-songwriter whose music fuses r&b, jazz, experimental, and electronic.[6] Simone released the single "Frostbite" in 2020.[7] She later released a music video for the song featuring local artists Kesswa and Supercoolwicked.[8] In 2021, she collaborated with cktrl on his single "mazes".[9]

In 2015 she founded the Trans Sistas of Color Project Detroit to provide support to trans women of color after the murder of Amber Monroe.[10] Through the organization she launched the comedy web series Femme Queen Chronicles that follows four trans women in Detroit, which she likened to Living Single and Chewing Gum.[2] Simone developed the series in part to "disrupt the narrative of black tragedy without sanitizing the very real tragedies that happen to us."[10] She is the director, writer, and stars in the series.[2] Femme Queen Chronicles debuted in 2018 and received positive critical reception.[10] She received financial support from the Knight Foundation to develop the series.[2] As of 2021, she is working with Janet Mock to adapt the show for television.[1]