Biography

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.

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