Aisha Raison

Aisha Raison is a Womanist, award-winning filmmaker/photographer, and poet who has used both skills as a multimedia artist and activist in the Memphis area. She started her career as a slam poet in 1997, becoming the first African American and female representing Memphis in poetry slam. She represented teams in Memphis and Winston Salem, then later worked as a mentor with Hattiloo Theatre's Write On Speak Out from 2014 until 2020. She authored her first poetry chapbook in 1998 called Afrodeessiack, creating the publishing company Afrodeesiack Press while attending Dyersburg State Community College. She would later assemble books such as Speaking in Cursive and Other Adventures of Little Girl Blue in 2012, Heroine Tracks in 2015, and Fear of an Enlightened Black Woman in 2017.

In 2016, Aisha merged her imagination, poetry, and vision into award-winning films such as Girls Like Me: a self/love story, Dancin' to the Blue Moon, her Covid-19 short Stolen Moments on the 8th Flo, her short documentary on the Byhalia Pipeline called Toxic Behavior, and her recent documentary on the Tyre Nichols protests called The Blues. She has been an activist photographer throughout Memphis since 2014 and works as a photojournalist with Fox 13 in Memphis. She is a 2022 graduate from Southwest Tennessee Community College, a 2023 graduate of the University of Memphis as a student in Africana Herstory, an alumni resident of Crosstown Arts, a 2019 recipient of the ArtsMemphis Art Acceleration Grant, and a 2024 recipient of the Black Creators Forum Short Film Grant which has funded her Southern haunting film short Stikki.