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

Her Ford Foundation-funded feature film NO! The Rape Documentary (2006) exposes the cultures of silence surrounding rape and sexual assault in African American communities — bringing together scholars, theologians, artists, activists, and survivors to demand accountability and reshape patriarchal cultures of violence. Its world premiere occurred 18 months before Title IX was successfully applied to campus sexual assault cases, making it 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 Aishah's own incest healing work — a demand, signed in every letter to her parents, that love cannot shield a failure of accountability. Since the 1990s, she has led more than 400 workshops and dialogues across the U.S. and in countries in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, and 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, the Highlander: The Movement School, the Collegeville Institute, Elm Community Insight, Spirit Rock Meditation Center, and Insight Meditation Society.

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

What has always grounded Aishah's survivor-centered cultural work — a rigorous, decades-long contemplative practice — she is now bringing into explicit public expression as a dharma teacher. With more than two decades of Vipassana meditation practice and over a year of cumulative silent retreat time across the U.S. and India, she is currently 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 and revered dharma teacher formation pathways in the Western Theravāda tradition, and serves as a resident teacher at Delaware Valley Insight. She also holds secular mindfulness credentials, including trauma-informed mindfulness teacher certification through Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach's MMTCP, Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness training with David A. Treleaven, and MBSR teacher qualification through Brown University's Mindfulness Center.

To learn more about Aishah's full body of work, visit linktr.ee/afrolez.

Salamishah Tillet presents the inaugural Courage Fund Award

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)