Aishah Shahidah Simmons

Aishah Shahidah Simmons (she/her) is an award-winning cultural worker who, for 30 years, has examined the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and sexual violence. She is also a trauma-informed, Mindfulness Meditation teacher who has been studying and practicing Theravada Buddhism for 20-years. Her lived experiences as a survivor of childhood and adult sexual violence committed to healing, accountability, and compassionate justice inform her teaching, film work, published writings, international lectures, and independent scholarship.

Presently, she is a member of the 2022-23 inaugural Changemaker Authors Cohort working on her memoir, Love, Justice, and Dharma, which is a continuation of work that originated with her 2020 Soros Media Fellowship. Love, Justice, and Dharma is the capstone of her trilogy of work centering on healing from and non-carceral accountability for childhood and adult sexual violence. It is also the bridge to her new direction of work primarily focused on offering resources and teachings on how mindfulness is a tool for supporting balance and cultivating compassion amid the often turbulent vicissitudes in life.

Aishah studied closely with her teacher, the late Toni Cade Bambara at Scribe Video Center in the early 1990s. With her self-defined AfroLez®femcentric pen and camera lens, Aishah wrote, directed and produced her widely acclaimed short videos Silence...Broken ©1993 and In My Father's House ©1996 address race, gender, homophobia, rape, reproductive justice, and misogyny.

Aishah is the producer, director and writer of the internationally acclaimed and award-winning feature length 2006-released film, NO! The Rape Documentary. Twelve years in the making and funded by the Ford Foundation, along with many other funding partners, NO! exposes the taboos that cover-up rape, sexual assault, and failed accountability in African-American communities. The film brings together leading and emerging Black scholars, theologians, artists, activists, men, women, and survivors to break silences and commit themselves to reshaping patriarchal cultures of violence against women and queer communities; and, to look at healing in those communities. NO! amplifies the imperative need for survivor-centered, non-carceral accountability. A precursor to the contemporary campus anti-sexual assault movements, NO! was ahead of its time. Its’ 2006-world premiere at the Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles, CA occurred 18-months before Title IX was successfully applied to campus sexual assault cases.

Aishah’s cultural work and activism have been both published and documented extensively in a wide range of media outlets including Lion’s Roar, USA Today, Black Perspectives (African American Intellectual Historical Society), Allure.com, #MeToo Movement International, The New York Times, NBC.com, Essence, CASSIUS, TruthOut, The Root, Imagine Otherwise, Crisis, Forbes, Left of Black, In These Times, Ms. Magazine, Alternet, ColorLines, The Philadelphia Tribune, The Chicago Defender, Black Agenda Report, NPR, Pacifica Radio Network and BET.

Aishah has screened her work, guest lectured, and facilitated workshops and dialogues to racially and ethnically diverse audiences at colleges and universities, high schools, conferences, international film festivals, rape crisis centers, battered women shelters, community centers, juvenile correctional facilities, and government sponsored events across the North American continent and in several countries in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Caribbean.