About Aishah Shahidah Simmons

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 decades-long body of survivor-centered work began in 1994 and includes the groundbreaking, Ford Foundation-funded feature film NO! The Rape Documentary (2006), a widely recognized precursor to the modern campus anti-sexual assault movement. She has led more than 400 workshops and dialogues across the United States and internationally, including 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, the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, Highlander: The Movement School, the Collegeville Institute, Elm Community Insight, Spirit Rock Meditation Center, and Insight Meditation Society.

She is the curator and editor of love WITH accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse (AK Press, 2019), co-winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBTQ Anthology, which brings together more than forty diasporic Black survivors, advocates, and family members exploring survivor-centered, non-carceral approaches to accountability.

Grounded in a rigorous, decades-long contemplative practice, Aishah brings more than two decades of Vipassanā meditation experience and over a year of cumulative silent retreat time across the United States and in India into her work as a dharma teacher. She is currently a member of the first cohort of the reconvened Spirit Rock Meditation Center and Insight Meditation Society Residential Retreat Teacher Training Program (2025–2028) 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 Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program (MMTCP), Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness training with David A. Treleaven, and Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) teacher qualification through Brown University’s Mindfulness Center in the School of Professional Studies..

You are warmly invited to explore Aishah Shahidah Simmons’ ongoing body of work at linktr.ee/afrolez, or to downloadher full bio andCurriculum Vitae.