Simone Durham was born and raised in Sacramento, CA. She moved to Baltimore, MD in 2011 to play volleyball at Morgan State University, a Historically Black University (HBCU) in Baltimore. She earned both her bachelor's and master's in sociology at Morgan in 2014 and 2016, and began the doctoral program in sociology at University of Maryland College Park in 2017. Simone is currently a full time faculty lecturer at her alma mater MSU and a UMD doctoral candidate working on her dissertation entitled "Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Black Millennial Meaning Making."

Simone is a critical race scholar, utilizing qualitative methods to investigate identity, meaning making, mental health, and social movements within Black and Black multiracial communities. Many of her major projects to date have focused on BLM. Her second year paper was a content analysis examining racial projects taken on by polarized news media sources in their coverage of the movement, her dissertation uses interviews to examine Black millennial perspectives on and engagement with movement, and she recently finished the manuscript for a co-authored reference book on BLM which will release in March 2025 under Bloomsbury publishing. Simone's other projects have explored crimmigration as a racial project, the paradox of Black death imagery as a tool used in the pursuit of Black liberation, and multiracial identity and socialization.

Simone has worked in higher education both as an adjunct faculty member and an administrator. She has taught undergraduate courses at Morgan State University, Anne Arundel Community College, and the University of Maryland. Courses she teaches include: Introduction to Sociology, Introduction to Anthropology, Social Problems, Social Psychology, Social Inequality, Sociology of Race Relations, Sociology of Deviance, Love & Intimate Relations, and Sociology of Sports. At Morgan, she previously worked as the coordinator for the university financial literacy program and graduation cohort tracking initiative through the Office of Student Success and Retention. Here at UMD, she previously served as a Graduate Writing Fellow of the Graduate Writing Center and a Graduate Student Advocate for the Graduate Student Legal Aid Office. Outside the university, Simone has served as a Digital Editor for Contexts Magazine, the public facing publication of the American Sociological Association, and taught creative writing classes for Next One Up, a non-profit organization serving Black middle and high school boys in Baltimore.