Social Justice Media Making: A Conversation with Mónica Enríquez-Enríquez and Aishah Shahidah Simmons

This event brings together two contemporary activist-artists whose multimedia and multifaceted work demonstrates the best that social justice media making can embody: Mónica Enríquez-Enríquez and Aishah Shahidah Simmons.

These two vibrant artist-activists will discuss their own multimedia work as well as the importance of media production for marginalized communities, examining how marginalized communities have and can mobilize media making tools in the service of social justice.

AISHAH SHAHIDAH SIMMONS (@Afrolez) is an AfroLez®femcentric Cultural Worker who for over twenty years has been both motivated and engaged as a cultural worker because she believes each one of us has the birth right to live in a world where oppression and exploitation based on gender, race/ethnicity, national origin/citizenship, sexual orientation, class, and/or religion of anyone is non-existent. Aishah is presently an adjunct faculty member in the Women's Studies and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender (LGBT) Studies program at Temple University where she teaches the undergraduate course Gay and Lesbian Lives, which examines the her/histories and contemporary realities of LGBTQ people in all of their diversity. Additionally, in the spring 2013 semester, she created, developed and is teaching the graduate and undergraduate seminar entitled, Audre Lorde: The Life and Work of a Silence Breaker. In 1992, she founded AfroLez® Productions, an AfroLez®femcentric multimedia arts company committed to using the moving image, the written and spoken word to address those issues which have a negative impact on marginalized and disenfranchised people. Aishah is the director of the award-winning, internationally-acclaimed documentary film NO!: The Rape Documentary, which explores the international reality of rape and other forms of sexual assault through the first person testimonies, scholarship, spirituality, activism and cultural work of African-Americans.

MÓNICA ENRÍQUEZ-ENRÍQUEZ is a queer Latina, born and raised in Colombia, who migrated to the U.S. in 2001. She received her M.F.A in Digital Arts and New Media from the University of California Santa Cruz, where her work Fragments of Migration explored queer asylum and constructions of citizenship in the U.S. She is currently based in New York, and her artistic and activist projects focus on the deportation, detention, and criminalization of communities of color. Mónica's video art installations include Escrito, Un/binding Desires, Intimate Margins, and Reclaiming Spaces. Her interdisciplinary interests include queer theory, migration and diaspora studies, cultural studies, and community based video installations. Art is for her a site for community activism and participation as well as a site to question institutional oppression and challenge normative constructions of gender, desire, citizenship, and nation. Mónica's work has been screened at the Women of Color Film Festival at UC Santa Cruz, the Queer Women of Color Film Festival in San Francisco, the Pittsburgh Contemporary Queer Cinemas Project, and the prestigious Frameline: The San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival. Her 2004 documentary A Journey Home—about queer Latina lesbians in the San Francisco Bay Area— won the Best Lesbian Film Award at the International Latino Film Festival. Her installation pieces have been shown in numerous immigrant, queer, and anti-violence community centers in both rural and urban spaces, as well as community galleries. Mónica's political and ethical commitment to making her art relevant and accessible to the communities she is in conversation with guides her production and exhibition practices.