Genae Shields wasn’t sure what photojournalism was when she got accepted into the program at Rochester Institute of Technology, and she definitely didn’t know where Rochester, NY, was. “I thought all of New York was New York City,” she laughs.

Although she knew that her photojournalism capstone project would be a book, it took a while for Genae to settle on a topic. Thinking back on her family’s history, she decided to share portraits and stories from Black survivors of sexual assault. “During the pandemic,” she explains, “I unfortunately had my own experience with assault. When it happened to me, I knew [the project] was something I had to do whether I included my story or not.”