Aishah Shahidah Simmons
Bio:
Aishah Shahidah Simmons is an award-winning Black feminist lesbian documentary filmmaker, activist, cultural worker, writer, and international lecturer whose work, for the past 25-years, examines the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and sexual violence. Her work is informed by her lived experiences as a child sexual abuse and adult rape survivor.
She is a 2016-2019 Just Beginnings Collaborative (JBC) fellow. Funded by the NoVo Foundation, the JBC fellowship initiates strategies to end child sexual abuse. Simmons’s JBC-funded project, love WITH accountability focuses on the power of transformative storytelling to tackle the global epidemic of child sexual abuse through the experiences, insights, and perspectives of diasporic Black child sexual abuse survivors and advocates.
Simmons is the editor of love WITH accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse (AK Press | Fall 2019). The collection features compelling writings by forty diasporic Black child sexual abuse survivors, advocates, and Simmons's mother who underscores the detrimental impact of parents/caregivers not believing their children when they disclose their sexual abuse. Love WITH Accountability explores disrupting the inhumane epidemic of child sexual abuse, humanely.
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?"
Previously, Simmons produced, wrote, and directed the 2006-released, Ford Foundation-funded, internationally acclaimed film, NO! The Rape Documentary. Over a decade in the making, NO!, which is subtitled in Spanish, French, and Portuguese, broke taboos that hid heterosexual rape and sexual assault in African-American communities. The film brought together leading and emerging Black scholars, theologians, artists, activists, men, women, and survivors to break silences and commit themselves to reshape patriarchal cultures of violence against women and queer communities. NO! has been continuously used in academic settings and also in global movements to end violence against women and children. The documentary was ahead of its time. Its' world premiere took place 19-months before Title IX was successfully applied to a campus sexual assault case, and nine-years before the award-winning film The Hunting Ground was released.
Alice Walker, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, says, "If the Black community in the Americas and the world would save itself, it must complete the work this film [NO!] begins."
The film's supplemental materials Breaking Silences, a two-hour video, and Unveiling the Silence, an interactive 100-page study guide, both funded by the Ford Foundation, are used internationally in educational institutions, rape crisis centers, battered women's shelters, community centers, and correctional facilities and at conferences and government-sponsored events.
Simmons is a Visiting Scholar at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), where she is also an Affiliate Scholar at the Ortner Center on Violence and Abuse in Relationships. Previously, she was a Visiting Scholar at the School for Social Policy and Practice at Penn. She's also been an Artist-in-Residence, Lecturer, Contingent and Distinguished Visiting Faculty at Williams College, Temple University, Scripps College, the University of Chicago and Spelman College.
A recipient of numerous awards for her work and activism, Simmons most recently received the 2019 Breakthrough U.S. Activist Impact Award, and the 2018 American Studies Association's Committee on Gender and Sexuality Studies Gloria E. Anzaldúa Award for Independent Scholars, Contingent or Community College Faculty.
She is an associate editor of the online publication, The Feminist Wire, and a member of the editorial board of The Feminist Wires Books at the University of Arizona Press. Her writings are published widely, and her cultural work and activism are documented extensively. Simmons has presented her work across the North American continent, and in numerous countries in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. She is on Twitter at @AfroLez
