Gilda Sheppard

“The role of the artist is like a lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of things you don’t see.”
― James Baldwin

Gilda Sheppard is an award-winning filmmaker who has screened her documentaries throughout the United States, and internationally in Ghana, West Africa, and at the Festival Afrique 360 Cannes, France, and in Germany at the International Black Film Festival in Berlin. Sheppard is a 2017 Hedgebrook Fellow for documentary film and a 2019 recipient of an Artist Trust Fellowship.

Sheppard currently completed her documentary Since I Been Down on education, organizing and healing developed and led by incarcerated women and men in Washington State’s prisons. Since I Been Down has been accepted at over13 film festivals in USA and Canada and won the Gold Prize at the Social Justice Film Festival and recognized among “Best of the Fest” at DOC NYC. 

For over a decade Sheppard has been teaching sociology classes in Washington State women and men prisons. She is a sponsor for the Black Prisoner’s Caucus, and is among the founders and faculty for FEPPS- Freedom Education for Puget Sound an organization offering college credited courses at Washington Correctional Center for Women.  

Sheppard is the author of several publication’s including Culturally Relevant Arts Education for Social Justice: A Way Out of No Way (2013). Gilda Sheppard is a Professor of Sociology, Cultural and Media studies at The Evergreen State College Tacoma Campus.