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.

Aishah Shahidah Simmons brings the confluence of cultural work, activism, and a 2500-year-old practice to ground her courage in living this complicated life. A survivor-healer, Black feminist lesbian award-winning writer-filmmaker, Aishah brings her life lens to work reinforced by a 22-year practice of Vipassana Meditation and trauma-informed, mindfulness meditation teacher certifications. More than one year of cumulative silent retreat practice in the U.S. and India, a daily meditation practice, three decades of therapy, and a cultivated community are foundational to Simmons moving through the trauma and suffering she experienced from childhood and adulthood sexual violence. Aishah’s cultural productions, such as the 2006 groundbreaking, Ford Foundation-funded acclaimed feature film, "NO! The Rape Documentary" and the 2020 Lambda Literary-award winning anthology, "Love WITH Accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse," break silences, offer healing paths for trauma, and provide visions for humanely disrupting the inhumane epidemic of sexual violence.

Ahead of its time, "NO!’s" world premiere at the 2006 Pan African Film Festival occurred 19 months before Title IX was successfully applied to campus sexual assault cases and is one of the contemporary instigators of the modern campus sexual assault movements. Since 1995, Aishah has led over 400 workshops and dialogues in the U.S. and in countries in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. She has received numerous awards and held Artist-in-Residence and/or guest faculty appointments at colleges/universities and organizations including the University of Chicago, Temple University, Scripps College, Spelman College, Williams College, the University of Pennsylvania, the Weekly Dharma Gathering Platform, Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, Elm Community Insight: An Engaged Meditation Society, Morgan State University, Insight Meditation Community of Western Massachusetts, Sounds True, the Highlander Research and Education Center, the Collegeville Institute and Spirit Rock Meditation Center.