Scheherazade Tillet is an artist and feminist activist. She received her BA in Child Development from Tufts University with a minor in fine art from the School of the Museum of Fine Art in Boston. After spending a semester abroad at the Mason Gross School of Fine Art at Rutgers University and working with artist Steve Hart, Tillet became interested in documentary photography and began her first long-form project capturing her sister’s healing from sexual violence. She received her Master's in Art Therapy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she deepened her practice of engaging art to help individuals and communities reclaim their stories and recover from trauma. Tillet explores the themes of beauty, grief, play, and freedom within the larger context of Black girlhood.
In 2000, Tillet transformed her series of documentary photographs into “Story of a Rape Survivor” or “SOARS,” a landmark performance that tells the journey of recovering from rape and finding hope amid ruin. She toured SOARS across hundreds of campus and cultural centers throughout the United States, reaching thousands of survivors. Three years later, Tillet founded and became the director of A Long Walk Home, an art organization that empowers young people to end violence against girls and women. As an art therapist and activist in Chicago’s North Lawndale community, Tillet’s practice expanded to collaborating with her subjects by teaching, now, several generations of Black girls and young women how to document their own lives. The School of the Art Institute hosts an annual group exhibition that uplifts and increases the visibility of A Long Walk Home’s young artists in its Girl/Friends program.
Tillet is best known for her vibrant and intimate portraits of Black girls coming of age throughout the African Diaspora. Ranging from her series, Eight, inspired by Sally Mann’s At Twelve, in which Tillet captured the complexity of her niece’s childhood during the pandemic, to the “Prom: Send Offs,” which chronicles the community celebration of Black girls as they take symbolic steps toward womanhood, to Kiddie’s Carnival, which brought her back to the rituals of play and performance and the site of her own upbringing in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad. Tillet has also recently curated two groundbreaking shows: Picturing Black Girlhood: Moments of Possibility (2022) at Express Newark, the largest photography exhibition on Black girlhood, featuring artists from ages 8 to 94. Last year, as part of the Chicago Architectural Biennial, The Black Girlhood Altar project at the Chicago Cultural Center was described by Hyperallergic as “multimedia, artifact-based, video, and object-based artwork to create sacred spaces and honor the lives of Black girls and young Black women who have gone missing or been murdered.” Tillet's most recent series, Breonna Taylor Family's Homes, was done in collaboration with Taylor’s family.
Her work has been celebrated in Elle Decor, Forbes, Frieze, Hyperallergic, Gagosian Magazine, The Guardian, Washington Post, New York Magazine/The Cut, and The New York Times. With Zoraida Lopez and Salamishah Tillet, she is currently editing the book, Picturing Black Girlhood (Aperture, 2026), and with award-winning authors Javaka Steptoe and Salamishah Tillet, she is working on the children’s book Will You Be My Monument? (Penguin), inspired by her large scale mural installation of the same name in downtown Newark. Tillet is also a grantee of the Chicago Monuments Project, for which she will spearhead a lasting monument to Rekia Boyd.
