Biography

Rafael Simón is an American actor, composer, music producer, and filmmaker whose career has unfolded across theater, film, television, music, and documentary. A multidisciplinary artist by instinct, he has spent more than two decades moving fluidly between performing, composing, producing, directing, and developing stories from both sides of the camera.

Born in New York City, Rafael grew up between New York, Washington, D.C., Caracas, Bethesda, Mexico City and Los Angeles. The constant movement between places and cultures shaped an early fascination with people, ideas, and the many ways a story can be told. His parents, Dr. Bolívar Pereyra and Dr. Edith Márquez, came from distinguished careers in medicine and international law and diplomacy, respectively, giving his upbringing an unusually broad international and intellectual backdrop.

Rafael studied a combination of anthropology, political science, social geography, and Romance-language literature at the University of Maryland before pursuing formal acting training at the National Conservatory for the Dramatic Arts, the Studio Theatre Acting Conservatory in Washington, D.C., and Casa del Teatro in Mexico City. He began his professional performing career on Washington, D.C. stages in the late 1990s.

What began in theater gradually expanded into a much wider creative practice. Rafael has accumulated more than 40 credited roles in film and television, working both in front of and behind the camera. As a composer, arranger, and music producer, he has created original music, scores, and soundscapes for feature films, documentaries, television, and more than 300 commercial campaigns, while collaborating with recording artists including Sam Sparro, Tessa Ia, Renée Mooi, and Ely Guerra.

His audiovisual work includes writing, directing, and producing both fiction and nonfiction, including the feature films Jazmines en Lídice and Aurora, and the documentaries Miles Electric: A Different Kind of Blue and La Candidata. His work has reached audiences through major international streaming platforms and has received support and exposure through networks, cultural institutions, and festivals.

For Rafael, the apparent distance between acting, music, filmmaking, and the study of ideas is precisely where the interesting territory begins. He continues to develop multidisciplinary projects exploring the relationship between storytelling, culture, technology, and the systems that shape our lives.

At the heart of his work is a simple conviction: curiosity is worth cultivating. Rafael seeks to make work that entertains, but also invites people to look again...to question what they think they know, to keep learning, and to imagine what might be possible if we became more conscious participants in the world we are creating.
- IMDb mini biography by: Gurrufio Timoto