I AM BLACK HISTORY | Scheherazade Tillet

Scheherazade Tillet

Scheherazade Tillet is Black History because she has transformed art into a tool for healing, justice, and collective remembrance. Her life’s work sits at the intersection of creativity, advocacy, and care, centering Black girls and women in narratives where they have too often been erased or harmed.

Named after the legendary feminist storyteller of The Arabian Nights, Scheherazade Tillet embodies the power of story as survival. She is Trinidadian and African American, born into a lineage shaped by movement, culture, and resistance. Raised between Chicago and Trinidad, her work reflects the rhythms of diaspora, ritual, and resilience.

In 2003, Scheherazade co founded A Long Walk Home, a national nonprofit organization that uses art to empower young people and end violence against girls and women. What began as a personal act of documentation became a movement. Her first long form project captured her sister Salamishah’s decades long healing journey after surviving sexual violence in college. That work evolved into the acclaimed multimedia performance Story of a Rape Survivor, which toured hundreds of campuses and cultural spaces across the country, reaching thousands of survivors and sparking conversations about trauma, accountability, and healing.

As Executive Director of A Long Walk Home, Scheherazade launched the Girl Friends Leadership Institute, a yearlong artist activist program that prepares girls and young women in Chicago to become social justice leaders in their schools and communities. The program has been at the forefront of movements addressing gender based violence, community harm, and state violence, including public art initiatives such as the Rekia Boyd memorial project as part of the organization’s Visibility Project.

Scheherazade’s artistic practice is deeply rooted in Black girlhood. As a photographer, curator, and art therapist, she creates intimate, site specific works that explore gendered vulnerability, racial invisibility, pleasure, play, and freedom. In 2016, she curated Picturing Black Girlhood at Columbia University, the first national photography exhibition to center African American women and girl photographers examining girlhood in one show. The exhibition has since expanded nationally, becoming the largest photography exhibition on Black girlhood to date.

Her work has been featured at institutions including the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Chicago Cultural Center, Express Newark, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the Rebuild Foundation. Projects such as The Black Girlhood Altar, presented during the Chicago Architectural Biennial, created sacred spaces to honor Black girls and young women who have been lost to violence. Her ongoing series, including Prom Send Offs and Breonna Taylor Family’s Homes, continue to examine memory, ritual, and collective care.

Scheherazade holds a Master’s degree in Art Therapy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Bachelor’s degree from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Her work has been recognized by Gloria Steinem, the NoVo Foundation, Chicago African Americans in Philanthropy, and numerous cultural institutions. She has been featured in major publications including The New York Times, The Guardian, Forbes, Teen Vogue, Marie Claire, and the Chicago Tribune.

Scheherazade Tillet is Black History because she refuses to let pain be invisible. She turns grief into ritual, art into advocacy, and memory into movement. Through her work, Black girls are not only seen. They are honored, protected, and remembered.

Black History is not only about what we survive. It is about how we heal and who we heal with. And Scheherazade Tillet continues to lead that work with courage, care, and clarity.