Aishah Shahidah Simmons

Aishah is an African-American feminist lesbian cultural worker who has primarily used the camera lens to make central that which has been and is on the periphery — the lives of Black lesbian and heterosexual women. Her cultural work is in service to her communities. Aishah creates social change by bringing progressive ideas, images, perspectives and voices from the margin to the center, “to visually break the silence that marginalized and oppressed people have kept and keep for so many known and unknown reasons.” Since the early 1990s, she has deeply understood the critical need to voice controversial and ignored subjects within Black communities without reinforcing stereotypes. This work aims to engage audiences and inspire them to work to end racism, sexism and homophobia in all its violent manifestations; to make progressive, spiritual, revolutionary social change irresistible. Since 1994, Aishah has been working on NO!, a feature-length documentary that started as a 20-minute work-in-progress piece, which addresses the rape and sexual assault of Black women. This film and her work aims to challenge and transform people’s thinking about heterosexual rape and sexual assault, along with how the intersection of oppressions negatively impact the lives of Black women who are survivors of sexual violence. While her work has a demonstrated appeal that transcends race, ethnicity and national origin, the audience for which she creates is first the African American community and secondly the Diasporic African community through the world. Her artmaking shares a creative healing process, a powerful form of resistance that she hopes can stand as a source of inspiration for others, specifically women and girls of color.