S. Hayley/Harlin Steele (they/she/ze/he) is a former foster youth, and genderfluid genderqueer activist who presently resides on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Muwekma Ohlone people. They are a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at UC Davis, and are receiving a dual designated emphasis in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Performance and Practice. Steele serves as an Assistant the Feminist Research Institute (FRI) and a Project Director at ModLab, an experimental media laboratory at UC Davis, where they have organized several projects that incorporate environmental data and concepts from technoscience into interactive media pieces. Steele's work includes the first articulation of "learning through gamemaking" as a generalizable educational method. 

Steele has presented their research into climate modeling at leading gatherings co-sponsored by the IPCC. Their work has contributed to the inclusion of new indicators in leading climate models. Drawing upon theoretical work by Katherine Buse, Steele treats stochastic climate modeling as an exercise in speculative nonfiction. Currently, he is directing the composition of a new climate modeling paradigm, BasedMIP, which disaggregates indicators and facilities the creation of user-developed scenarios. Steele's creative work also includes Destination Wedding 2070 (2019), a wedding planning simulator set fifty years in the future in which "climate change is the ultimate wedding crasher" created in collaboration with Meanwhile Netprov Studio and EarthGames UW. Steele is also creator and director of Sivad, an analog RPG in which character stats are fused with ecological data developed through research at ModLab.

Steele's interest in developing stronger relations between the humanities and geoscience began in 2009, while completing their MFA degree at Portland State University. There they held an Assistantship with the Humanities Sustainability Research Project (HSRP) at the Portland Center for Public Humanities. As part of her work, Steele co-organized the 2008  conference 'Understanding Sustainability: Perspectives from the Humanities,' a seminal gathering in what is now often called Sustainability Studies. In 2016, pursuing their interest in the critical study of code, Steele became an Advanced Research Affiliate with the Humanities and Critical Code Studies (HaCCS) Lab at the University of California (USC), and has participated in the biannual Critical Code Studies Working Group (CCSWG) since that time. 

Steele has been part of the cooperative movement since 2011, and served as an economist with the California Economists Collective (CEC) in 2019-22, and on the steering committee of Cascade Cooperatives in 2020-21. In 2015, they served as Development Director for Land Action, a squatters mutual aid network based in Oakland, CA focused on the redistribution of vacant, privately held land for use as urban farms and emergency housing. From 2013-15 they served as one of three organizers of Villagecraft, a decentralized learning network focused on skillshares and hands-on learning that grew to over 1500 learners and 50 facilitators in the San Francisco Bay Area. Steele spoke about this work in a talk for the 2024 Solarpunk Conference.

Steele's artistic work has taken a variety of forms including pieces in e-lit, larp, netprov, and transmedia. Their creative work includes Thermophiles in Love (2016), a 5-gender dating game that incorporates biological data about microorganisms in a playful critique of gender bio-essentialism, which served as a proof of concept for their theoretical work on a critical design methodology they call "gender playability." They received their MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from Portland State University in 2014, and their writing has appeared in Slingshot, Subversas Magazine, East Bay Express, The International Journal of Roleplaying, and [Trigger]: A Journal of Catarealism and Speculative Sexuality. 

Steele has taught a number of academic courses, including an upper-division "Law, Data, and Society" class in the Department of Science and Technolgy Studies (STS) at UC Davis, as well as upper-division in creative writing and literature for the Department of English at Western Washington University.