Salamishah Tillet is a scholar, writer, and feminist activist. She is the Henry Rutgers Distinguished Professor of Africana Studies and Creative Writing at Rutgers University-Newark, New Jersey, where she also directs the New Arts Justice Initiative. A regular contributor to Aperture magazine, her essays have also appeared in Aperture monographs about Coreen Simpson and Tyler Mitchell. Tillet is contributing critic at large for The New York Times and winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. She is also the author of Nina Simone and the World She Made (2027).

Scheherazade Tillet is a photo-based artist, curator, and feminist activist and the founder of A Long Walk Home and the Girl/Friends Program, Chicago. Tillet holds a BA in child development with a minor in fine art from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, Boston. She also holds an MA in therapy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Tillet's work explores themes of beauty, grief, play, and freedom within the larger context of Black girlhood. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Weinberg/Newton Gallery, Chicago; Express Newark; Columbia University; and Rutgers University-Newark, New Jersey, and featured in ELLE Decor, Forbes, Frieze, Hyperallergic, The New York Times, The Cut, and Guardian US. Tillet is the recipient of the 2025 Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship in Art award. She is also cocurator of Picturing Black Girlhood (2016) and Picturing Black Girlhood: Moments of Possibility (2022).