SpeakOut | Aishah Shahidah Simmons

About

Speeches

Aishah Shahidah Simmons is an award-winning filmmaker, author, dharma teacher, survivor-healer, and Black feminist lesbian cultural worker. A survivor of childhood sexual abuse and adult rape, she has devoted 30 years to examining race, gender, sexuality, and sexual violence through cultural production, contemplative practice, and survivor-centered education.

Aishah is the producer, director, and writer of the groundbreaking, Ford Foundation-funded NO! The Rape Documentary (2006), which breaks silences around rape, sexual assault, and accountability in African American communities. Subtitled in Spanish, French, Portuguese, and German, NO! has screened at colleges, universities, corporations, non-governmental organizations, film festivals, and community organizations across five continents. Its world premiere at the 2006 Pan African Film Festival occurred 19 months before Title IX was successfully applied to campus sexual assault cases, making it one of the contemporary instigators of the modern campus sexual assault movement.

Her Lambda Literary Award-winning anthology, Love WITH Accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse (AK Press, 2019), is equally groundbreaking: more than 40 courageous, vulnerable contributions by diasporic Black child sexual abuse survivors and advocates naming child sexual abuse within Black families, centering survivors' healing, envisioning accountability beyond policing and prisons.

A Theravāda Buddhist practitioner for almost 25 years, Aishah is a dharma teacher and Resident Teacher at Delaware Valley Insight, a qualified MBSR teacher through Brown University's Mindfulness Center, and certified in Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness. Her contemplative practice is inseparable from her justice work, weaving Buddhist frameworks with Black feminist thought to offer practices for meeting suffering with clarity, compassion, and action.

Since the 1990s, she has led hundreds of workshops and dialogues across the United States and internationally, from South Africa, where she observed the historic 1994 elections that catalyzed NO!, to the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, where as part of a six-member delegation she addressed violence against Black women and femmes at the C.E.R.D. Review, and has held residencies and guest faculty appointments at colleges, universities, dharma centers, and movement organizations across the country.

Among her numerous honors, Aishah is the 2024 inaugural co-recipient, with Stephanie "Sparkle" Edwards, of the Courage Fund Award at the Ford Foundation — an initiative co-founded by National Book Award-winning author Ta-Nehisi Coates; Kamilah Forbes, Executive Producer of the Apollo Theater; Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and scholar Salamishah Tillet, Ph.D.; artist Scheherazade Tillet of A Long Walk Home; and Ted Bunch and Tony Porter of A Call to Men — to support Black survivors of sexual violence and those dedicated to ending it. She also received the SCLC/W.O.M.E.N. Dr. Evelyn Gibson Lowery "Faithful Servant" Award at the 47th Annual Drum Major for Justice Gala (2026). The Aishah Shahidah Simmons Papers are held at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University.

Turning Toward Suffering: Mindfulness Frameworks for Difficult Times Drawing on more than two decades of contemplative practice, Aishah offers teachings on meeting suffering with clarity, compassion, and courageous action. In a time of relentless difficulty, mindfulness practice offers not an escape but a steadier way of being present — supporting individuals and organizations in responding rather than reacting to the turbulence of our times.

Black Feminism and Mindfulness: Liberation from Within Weaving together the writings of Toni Cade Bambara and Audre Lorde with Buddhist mindfulness practice, Aishah offers a culturally grounded framework for liberation. Participants leave with concrete practices for discernment, decreased reactivity, and compassionate care for themselves and others.

NO! The Rape Documentary — Screening and Discussion Film program Aishah presents her groundbreaking, Ford Foundation-funded feature documentary followed by facilitated Q&A and discussion. Through the lens of Black experiences, NO! breaks the silence around rape and sexual assault, speaking to a universal reality and offering pathways toward accountability, healing, and cultural transformation. A contemporary instigator of the modern campus sexual assault movement, it has sparked survivor-centered organizing and dialogue worldwide.

Love WITH Accountability — Book Talk and Discussion Talk Aishah presents her Lambda Literary Award-winning anthology and the survivor-centered framework it embodies, centering the healing of child sexual abuse survivors while exploring how we address harm within families and communities without relying on policing and prisons. Timely, necessary, and deeply human.

**Digging Up the Roots of Sexual Violence ** Drawing on more than 30 years of survivor-centered cultural work, Aishah unearths the contradictions, silences, and myths that allow sexual violence to flourish across communities and institutions — and offers frameworks for accountability that center healing over punishment.

Bearing Witness, Staying Whole: Mindfulness Practices for the Long-Haul These are difficult times, and the work of justice, healing, and accountability is long. This offering neither bypasses the weight of that reality nor surrenders to it. Drawing on contemplative practice, Aishah offers tools for staying present to suffering without being consumed by it, sustaining the capacity for engagement, care, and action over the long haul. Tailored for students, educators, justice workers, activists, and corporate audiences

Nourishing the Roots: The Four Brahmavihāras (or Four Heart Abodes) Loving-kindness, compassion, appreciative joy, and equanimity — the brahmavihāras are four expressions of love in their purest and fiercest sense, ancient heart practices that cultivate our innate capacity for care, connection, and inner balance. This offering invites participants into direct experience of these practices, meeting the full range of human experience with an open and steady heart. Accessible to all, and tailorable for students, justice workers, educators, activists, and corporate audiences.