[1] She took courses at the Fashion Institute of Technology and Parsons School of Design, and studied with Frank Stewart, Studio Museum in Harlem in 1977.
[1][2] She then became a freelance fashion photographer for the Village Voice and the Amsterdam News in the early 1980s, and covered many African-American cultural and political events in the mid-1980s.
She constructed a portable studio and brought it to clubs in downtown Manhattan, barbershops in Harlem, and braiding salons in Queens.
[2] Her work's ability to present a wide variety of subjects with "depth of character and dignity" has been compared to that of Diane Arbus and Weegee.
Simpson's works have been collected by the Museum of Modern Art, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Musee de la Photographie in Belgium, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture,[8] the International Center for Photography, the Harlem State Office, and the James Van Der Zee Institute.