[2] Simon developed her talent for musical composition at East Denver High School, from which she graduated in 1896.
She finally decided to pursue advanced studies in film, and in 1926 went to Berlin where she became a film-making student in Technische Hochschule.
The same year, Lilian Sabine wrote an article about Simon for the Women's Page of Abel's Photographic Weekly, which was published in three parts alongside a column entitled 'Among Us Girls!'
Simon employed a Hollywood-style narrative and divided her film into three clear sections: Prelude, Variations and Finale.
By drawing upon experimental traditions found in international art, film, and photography movements of the 1920s, Simon transforms a simple melodramatic love story into an avant-garde feminist short film.Rosanna Maule and Catherine Russell have also written about Hands, stating for Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media that Hands "builds on the male-modernist aesthetics of international photography while also being deeply inflected by Hollywood paradigms of gendered narrative.
"[4] In the 1940s Simon closed her photographic studio and lived out her later years with her son Julian, working as a book restorer at the San Francisco Public Library.
Her photographic prints were donated to libraries and galleries in the United States, and her negative plates were donated to American collections including the New York Public Library and the Institute for the Federal Theatre Project at George Mason University.