PHOTO CREDIT: ZHEE CHATMON

PHOTO CREDIT: ZHEE CHATMON

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.
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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.

 “If the Black community in the Americas and in the world would save itself, it must complete the work that [NO!] begins.”
—Alice Walker, the Pulitzer Prize and National Book award-winning, and Human Rights Activist

Since 2006, NO! and its supplemental materials have been used continuously in high schools, colleges and universities, rape crisis centers, battered women's shelters, community centers, correctional facilities, churches, and at conferences and government-sponsored events in the U.S., and countries in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic and its’ devastating economic impact, NO! The Rape Documentary is available for streaming rental in Spanish, French, Portuguese, and German for $1.00 for 72-hour rental periods until further notice.

The #LoveWITHAccountability® Project emerged from Aishah’s personal incest healing work. Demanding a conversation with her divorced parents about their lack of response to her being sexually abused as a child, Aishah signed "Love WITH Accountability" in virtually every communiqué to them. In doing so, Aishah emphasized that her deep love for her parents could not shield their lack of accountability for the sexual violence she endured as child. Funded initially by a four-year Just Beginnings Collaborative (JBC) Fellowship (January 2016 through December 2019), #LoveWITHAccountability® examines how the silence around child sexual abuse in the familial institution plays a direct role in creating a sexual violence culture in all other institutions—religious, academic, activist, political, and professional.

The 2020 Lambda Literary Award (Lammy)-winning, Love WITH Accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse (AK Press, Fall 2019), is an anthology that Aishah organized and edited. It builds on the 2016 #LoveWITHAccountability Forum. The collection of courageous, vulnerable writings totaling more than 40-contributions is a hybrid of most of the revised texts that were originally published in The Feminist Wire, fifteen original essays/poems, and a foreword by award-winning writer, Darnell L. Moore. The transformative writings feature experiences and perspectives by diasporic Black child sexual abuse survivors, advocates, and Aishah’s mother, who underscores the detrimental impact of parents/caregivers not believing their children when they disclose their sexual abuse. The contributors explore how we can center survivors’ healing process, and simultaneously address childhood sexual abuse without depending on policing and prisons.

Feminist activist Gloria Steinem says of Love WITH Accountability, "With this brave and healing anthology of truth-telling about sexual abuse within Black families, Aishah Shahidah Simmons sets an example for all families. If we could all raise just one generation of children without violence or the threat of violence, who knows what might be possible?" 

Aishah is a a guest community leader at Elm Community Insight Meditation, guest teaching faculty in the Black Queer…Everything program at Morgan State University, and one of the hosts of the Inside Out Radio Show on WPFW Pacifica Radio in Washington, DC. Previously, she was a member of the guest teaching faculty on the Weekly Dharma Gathering platform, and Barre Center for Buddhist Studies. Previously, Aishah was a 2019-2020 Visiting Scholar at the Annenberg School for Communication, a 2016-2018 Visiting Scholar at the School for Social Policy and Practice (SP2) at the University of Pennsylvania., a 2015-2016 Sterling Brown Professor of Africana Studies at Williams College, a Contingent Faculty Member in the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Temple University, an O’Brien Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies Department at Scripps College, an Artist-in-Residence at the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture and a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago, and an Artist-in-Residence at Spelman College’s Digital Moving Image Salon. Aishah was an Associate Editor of the online publication The Feminist Wire from 2012-2017. Her essays and articles have been published widely in anthologies, journals, and other media.

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. You can follow Aishah on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.