Temple University, 821 Anderson Hall

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.