Spend your lunch hour with Ohio Humanities Council and the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University’s 2025–2026 film fellow Simone Barros as she presents a short excerpt from her work-in-progress feature experimental film, The Dead Will Show You the Way: A Fugue for Moss and Memory. Detailing her approach to this film, Simone discusses devised directing techniques, utilizing choreopoem structures in voice-over narration and associative editing to explore cinema cognition. 

Barros’s talk will take place during Lunch on Fridays from 12:15 to 1:30pm Friday, February 6 in CIA's Peter B. Lewis Theater. 

The Dead Will Show You the Way: A Fugue for Moss and Memory, an experimental documentary that connects the science of forest moss with the history of escaped slaves who used moss to navigate the Underground Railroad in Ohio. The film creates parallels between 96 year-old Joan Southgate, an advocate preserving Ohio's role in the abolitionist movement and Dr. Bob Klips, a bryologist cataloguing 420 moss species in Ohio. But inconsistencies arise between memory and historical documentation, perception and scientific reclassifications thus raising questions of how to know oneself when the past isn’t fully on record.

Speaker Bio

Cabo-Verdean American artist, Simone Barros creates films, plays and audio works excavating the boundaries of solipsism and symbiosis, the intellect and the somatic, between waking and dreaming, culminating in somatic cinema cognition. 

As an audiobook director, Simone helmed award-winning audiobook editions of Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle, Nikole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, Naomi Klein’s Doppelgänger, Charlie Kaufman’s Antkind and directed casts including Cynthia Ervio, Maya Hawke, Dewanda Wise and Kristen Sieh. 

The Rubelle & Norman Schafler Gallery (NYC, 2024), The 8th Floor gallery (NYC, 2023), Cosmic Rays Film Festival (Durham, 2023), MONO XVI Cinematic Arts Festival (NYC, 2022), Cleveland International Film Festival (2019) and Chagrin Documentary Festival (2019) screened Simone’s works. Third Coast International Audio Festival (Chicago, 2020) and the On Air Festival (NYC, 2020) featured Simone’s soundscape and audio drama. Cleveland Public Theatre staged Simone’s plays. 

Simone taught filmmaking at Pratt Institute, Cleveland Institute of Art and Cuyahoga Community College. She earned her BFA at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and her MFA at Duke University where she served as a 2022 Duke Flaherty Film Seminar Fellow. She received an Ohio Arts Council Grant Fellowship in 2016, UnionDocs Work-in-Progress Artist Residency in 2023 and an Ohio Humanities Council Film Fellowship 2025–2026 with the Wexner Arts Center. 

Parking: Lunch on Fridays attendees may park in CIA's Lot 73 and Annex Lot, both of which surround our campus. Please note that signs posted around those lots correctly state that parking typically requires a CIA permit or visitor pass and that violators will be ticketed. However, to accommodate our valued Lunch on Fridays attendees, that policy won't be enforced during the program. Have questions? Please contact Reinberger Gallery at reinbergergallery@cia.edu or 216.421.7407.

Sponsors