Simon(e) van Saarloos is a recipient of the Berkeley-Portugal Research Fund for Graduate Students.
van Saarloos is a writer, artistic collaborator, and independent curator whose work spans theory, literature, and contemporary art. They are the author of Against Ageism: A Queer Manifesto (2023), Take ’Em Down: Scattered Monuments and Queer Forgetting (2021), and Playing Monogamy (2019), among several books in Dutch, and are currently writing Trans Despair for AK Press. Their writing appears in academic journals including Performance Philosophy, Postmodern Culture, Porn Studies, and Trans Studies Quarterly, alongside fiction and theater.
In 2025, van Saarloos obtained funding to conduct research at the Center for Communication and Culture at Universidade Católica Portuguesa in Lisbon, where they presented their work on ageism and decolonization. Van Saarloos has curated public programming and artistic collaborations internationally, including queer programming for the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA 2022, 2023), performances at the 2024 Malta Biennial, and contributions to exhibitions such as Claudia Rankine’s For Real For Real at DAADGalerie Berlin (2025). A PhD candidate in Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, van Saarloos’s research engages Black feminist thought and quantum physics, with a focus on the rhetorical (im)possibility of existence without defense.