Aishah Shahidah Simmons is a survivor-healer, Black feminist lesbian, award-winning writer-filmmaker, and contemplative practitioner whose work addresses sexual violence, healing, and liberation at the intersection of cultural production.

Her Ford Foundation-funded feature film NO! The Rape Documentary (2006) addresses sexual violence in Black communities, exposing cultures of silence surrounding rape and sexual assault in African American communities. The film brings together scholars, theologians, artists, activists, and survivors to demand accountability and challenge patriarchal cultures of violence. Its world premiere occurred 18 months before Title IX was successfully applied to campus sexual assault cases, positioning it as a widely recognized precursor to the modern campus anti-sexual assault movement.

That same commitment to breaking silence and centering survivors carries through her Lambda Literary Award-winning anthology love WITH accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse (AK Press, 2019), which grew from Simmons’ own child sexual abuse survivor healing work—a demand, signed in every letter to her parents, that love cannot shield a failure of accountability.

Since the 1990s, Simmons has led more than 400 workshops and dialogues across the United States and internationally, including in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. She has held artist-in-residence and guest faculty appointments at institutions including the University of Chicago, Spelman College, University of Pennsylvania, Williams College, Scripps College, Morgan State University, Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, Highlander: The Movement School, the Collegeville Institute, Elm Community Insight, Spirit Rock Meditation Center, and Insight Meditation Society.

Salamishah Tillet presents the inaugural Courage Fund Award

What has always grounded Simmons’ survivor-centered cultural work—a rigorous, decades-long contemplative practice—she now brings into explicit public expression as a Dharma teacher. With more than two decades of Vipassana (Insight Meditation) practice and over a year of cumulative silent retreat time across the United States and India, she is a member of the first cohort of the reconvened Spirit Rock Meditation Center and Insight Meditation Society (IMS) Residential Retreat Teacher Training Program (2025–2028), one of the most selective Dharma teacher training pathways in the Western Theravāda tradition.Curriculum Vitae

She currently serves as a resident teacher at Delaware Valley Insight and holds secular mindfulness credentials, including trauma-informed mindfulness teacher certification through Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach’s Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program (MMTCP), Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness training with David A. Treleaven, and MBSR teacher qualification through Brown University’s Mindfulness Center.

To learn more about Aishah Shahidah Simmons’ full body of work, visit linktr.ee/afrolez, or download her full bio and Curriculum Vitae.

NO! 25th Ancestral Remembrance Video in honor of Kagendo Murungi, Dr. Aaronette M. White, Essex Hemphill, and Toni Cade Bambara

Filmography

“Introducing - love WITH accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse” © 2020,
USA Color/Digital Video/ 28-minutes

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)