Aishah Shahidah Simmons

Aishah Shahidah Simmons

Historia

Aishah Shahidah Simmons is the founder and president of AfroLez® Productions. She is an award-winning Black feminist lesbian independent filmmaker, international lecturer, and activist based in Philadelphia, PA. Her internationally acclaimed shorts Silence...Broken, In My Father’s House, and NO!, explore the issues of race, gender, homophobia, rape and misogyny. For three years Ms. Simmons was a co-producer of two television programs for WYBE-TV35 in Philadelphia, PA. She has screened her work and lectured on the impact of the intersections of oppressions, on African-American women’s lives, in Spain, Mexico, South Africa, England, France, Canada, the Netherlands, Hungary, and at numerous colleges/universities and conferences across the United States. Her awards include the 1994 Philadelphia Gay Pride Award; the 1995 Atlantic City Black Film Festival Filmmaker Award; the 1998 Audre Lorde Legacy Award of the Union Institute Center for Women, the 1998 NAACP Exemplary Citizen Award, finalist for the 1998 Roy W. Dean Grant, and the 2000 Bread and Roses Community Fund’s Waters Award for Intergenerational Activism.

Perfil

Aishah Shahidah Simmons

Películas

No! The Rape Documentary
No! The Rape Documentary
Director
NO! The Rape Documentary is the 2006-released Ford-Foundation funded award-winning, internationally acclaimed, groundbreaking feature length film that explores the international atrocity of heterosexual rape and other forms of sexual assault through the first person testimonies, scholarship, spirituality, activism, and cultural work of Black people in the United States. NO! also explores how rape is used as a weapon of homophobia. NO! is a Black feminist educational organizing tool that has been used in the global movements to end violence against women and children for ten years and counting.
In My Father's House
In My Father's House
Self
A documentary short about Aishah's Black feminist lesbian exploration of her coming out process through self reflection, and candid conversations with her father, Michael Simmons, her younger brother, Tyree Cinque Simmons (DJ Drama), and Yvonne Marie Jones, one of her best friends from high school.
In My Father's House
In My Father's House
Producer
A documentary short about Aishah's Black feminist lesbian exploration of her coming out process through self reflection, and candid conversations with her father, Michael Simmons, her younger brother, Tyree Cinque Simmons (DJ Drama), and Yvonne Marie Jones, one of her best friends from high school.
In My Father's House
In My Father's House
Director
A documentary short about Aishah's Black feminist lesbian exploration of her coming out process through self reflection, and candid conversations with her father, Michael Simmons, her younger brother, Tyree Cinque Simmons (DJ Drama), and Yvonne Marie Jones, one of her best friends from high school.
Silence... Broken
Silence... Broken
Director
Silence...Broken is an experimental narrative short about an African American lesbian's refusal to be silent about racism, sexism and homophobia. Featuring the poetry of acclaimed poet Jourdan Keith, this video is dedicated to the memory of self-defined Black Lesbian Feminist Warrior Mother Poet Audre Lorde who died in 1992 after a fourteen-year battle with breast cancer. This experimental short was created out of the filmmaker's personal need to see on screen the internal and external struggle Black lesbians go through when they constantly fight against choosing between their race, their gender and their sexuality in a racist, sexist and homophobic society. Silence...Broken is strongly influenced by award-winning filmmaker Marlon Riggs' masterpiece Tongues Untied about Black gay men.