Gilda is an award-winning filmmaker who has screened her documentaries throughout the United States, and internationally in Ghana, West Africa, at the Festival Afrique Cannes Film Festival, and in Germany at the International Black Film Festival in Berlin. Sheppard is a 2017 Hedgebrook Fellow for documentary film, a 2019 recipient of an Artist Trust Fellowship and 2023 Best Director for Documentary at the New York Independent Film Festival.
Her documentaries include stories of resilience of Liberian women and children refugees in Ghana; three generations of Black families in an urban neighborhood; and a film ethnography of stories from folklore started by Zora Neale Hurston in Alabama's AfricaTown.
Sheppard is attracted to the power of film as a tool for human interaction, healing and justice to promote dialogue and action across significant differences. Her work explores oppression, and activism particularly in relationships to power, and the triumph of the human spirit to inspire imagination and creativity.
For over a decade, Sheppard has taught sociology classes in Washington State prisons and is a co-founder and faculty for Freedom Education for Puget Sound (FEPPS) an organization offering college credit courses at Washington Corrections Center for Women. Gilda faculty emerita at The Evergreen State College Tacoma Campus.