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 inform her commitment to breaking silences, healing from trauma, and non-carceral accountability for harm.

Presently, she is a member of the 2022-23 inaugural Changemaker Authors Cohort working on Love, Justice, and Dharma her memoir in process that 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 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 (1994-2006) 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 and the #MeToo hashtag going viral, NO! was ahead of its time. Its’ February 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.

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

As a member of the Just Beginnings Collaborative’s (JBC), 2016-2019 inaugural cohort, Aishah created the multimedia project, #LoveWITHAccountability®. The project examines how the silence around child sexual abuse (CSA) in the familial institution plays a direct role in creating a culture of sexual violence in all other institutions—religious, academic, activist, political and professional. This work is in community with multiracial activists, scholars, and grassroots organizers who are identifying systemic oppressions that disenfranchise marginalized communities while simultaneously exploring ways to address CSA and other forms of violence outside the criminal (in)justice apparatus.

Aishah organized and edited the 2020 Lambda Literary Award-winning, Love WITH Accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse (AK Press, Fall 2019). The anthology builds on The Feminist Wire’s 2016 #LoveWITHAccountability online Forum that Aishah envisioned, curated, and co-edited. 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 TheFeministWire.com, 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 processes, and simultaneously address childhood sexual abuse without relying on policing and prisons.

Gloria Steinem and Aishah Shahidah Simmons

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?"

Support Independent Publishers! Purchase Love WITH Accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse from AK Press.

Aishah is a recipient of numerous fellowships and awards. Most recently she received the SpiderWeave Flow Fund, the 2022 Changemaker Authors Cohort, 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBTQ anthology, a 2020 Soros Media Fellowship, the 2019 Breakthrough US Activist Impact Award, and the 2018 American Studies Association’s Committee on Gender and Sexuality Studies annual Gloria E. Anzaldúa Award for Independent Scholars, Contingent or Community College Faculty.

“The Committee was thoroughly impressed with your important cultural work at the forefront of intersectional feminist praxis. We agree that NO! The Rape Documentary was indeed “ahead of its time” and that it thoroughly reflects and builds on the vital tradition of work generated by women of color activists, cultural workers, and scholars.”

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.

From 2012-2017, Aishah was an Associate Editor of online publication, TheFeministWire.com. Her essays and articles have been published widely in anthologies, journals, and other media.

Her cultural work and activism have been both published widely and documented extensively in a wide range of media outlets including Lion’s Roar, USA Today, Black Perspectives (African American Intellectual Historical Society), #MeToo Movement, Allure.com, People.com, The New York Times, NBC.com, Essence, CASSIUS, Hematopoiesis Press, 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.

Click here for an in-depth, non-exclusive listing of Aishah’s media coverage from 1994 — 2021.

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.

Filmography

the late poet Essex Hemphill performing “To Some Supposed Brothers” in NO!

For Women of Rage and Reason performed in NO! by Moon Wisdom (Dr. Tamara L. Xavier)