Rachel Simmons lives and works in Winter Park, Florida. She holds an MFA from Louisiana State University. Since 2000 she has been actively involved in socially engaged art projects as an artist-educator at Rollins College. In 2009, she was given the Florida Campus Compact Service-Learning Faculty Award for the State of Florida. That same year, Rachel journeyed to Antarctica for the second time to make work about climate change and ecotourism. Most recently, she traveled across the desert landscapes of Namibia to research ecotourism in southwestern Africa. She often collaborates with scholars from other academic disciplines to create her mixed media work. Current collaborative projects include Future Bear with Julian Chambliss and The Aesthetics of Scale with Lee Lines.