Who is Sophia Nahli Allison? Lizzo faces new allegations from Academy Award nominee in wake of a bombshell lawsuit 

On Tuesday, August 1, Academy Award nominee documentarian and photographer Sophia Nahli Allison decided to open up about her own experiences with Lizzo after a lawsuit was filed against the latter.

Lizzo is a rapper, singer, songwriter, and actress, whose backup dancers have accused her of alleged s*xual harassment and creating a hostile work environment. The lawsuit also includes allegations that Lizzo forced one of them to touch a n*ked performer at an Amsterdam club while also subjecting three of them to “excruciating” auditions when she heard fake reports of the group drinking on the job.

Here's what Allison said about Lizzo. (Image via Twitter/Sophia Nahli Allison)

As soon as the news of the bombshell lawsuit surfaced on the internet, Sophia Nahli Allison came up with her own allegations against Lizzo. She took to social media platforms like Reddit and Twitter to share her own negative experience with the Big Grrrl Small World songstress.

She mentioned how she usually ignores anything “pop culture related” but after learning about the lawsuit, she couldn’t help but speak up. She captioned her tweet:

“Sharing this because validating other Black women’s experiences is deeply important to me.”

Along with this, she shared an image with long texts that mentions how she quit after working with Lizzo for 2 weeks back in 2019 as she was “treated with such disrespect” by her. Sophia Nahli Allison also accused Lizzo of being “arrogant, self-centered, and unkind” and how she “felt gaslit” and “deeply hurt” in her presence. She wrapped up by saying how such “abuse of power” was pretty common and shared her “love and support” for the plaintiffs.

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Sophia Nahli Allison was the 2017 Student Video Photographer of the Year

Sophia Nahli Allison is a 36-year-old experimental documentary filmmaker as well as a photographer hailing from Los Angeles, California. The 2020 United States Artists Fellow, organized by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, works both from her hometown and from Durham in North Carolina.

A graduate of Columbia College Chicago in photojournalism, Sophia Nahli Allison also has a master’s degree in visual communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her specialty is conjuring up ancestral memories while bridging the gap between fiction and non-fiction narration, as per United States Artists.

Sophia Nahli Allison has also served as a resident and fellow at The Macdowell Colony in 2019, apart from being a 3Arts Fellow at France’s The Camargo Foundation. She has also been part of New York’s The Center for Photography and POV Spark’s African Interactive Art Residency.

Allison has earned film grants from both Glassbreaker Films and the Sundance Institute’s New Frontier Lab Programs. However, she rose to fame when her critically acclaimed 2019 short film, A Love Song For Latasha, received global recognition.

It earned an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary (Short Subject), an IDA nomination for Best Short, and won the Jury Award for Best Documentary Short at the AFI Fest.

Sophia Nahli Allison’s short film debuted at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival and was also screened at The New Orleans Film Festival, BlackStar Film Festival, and Sundance Film Festival.

She has also been featured in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Los Angeles FilmForum at MOCA, among other publications. However, according to her official website, she considers the 2017 Student Video Photographer of the Year award by The White House News Photographers Association as her biggest feat to date.

Another accolade of Sophia Nahli Allison includes the 2014 Chicago 3Arts Award which comprised a $25,000 grant for her work as a teaching artist. She was also the co-facilitator for the documentary, Magic As Resistance, at the 2018 Allied Media Conference.

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In brief, exploring the lawsuit against Lizzo

Grammy Award-winning singer Lizzo has been sued by three of her former dancers who have accused her of creating a hostile workspace and of s*xually harassing them. The lawsuit was filed by Arianna Davis, Crystal Williams, and Noelle Rodriguez at Los Angeles County Superior Court on Tuesday, August 1.

The charges against Lizzo include s*xual, religious, and racial abuse, disability discrimination, assault, wrongful termination, interference with prospective economic advantage, and false imprisonment.

The plaintiffs have claimed that the songstress pressured them to engage with n*de performers at an Amsterdam club and body-shamed one of them for weight gain before belittling and firing her.

Besides that, the lawsuit also accuses Shirlene Quigley, the captain of Lizzo’s dance team, of proselytizing (to promote one’s religious beliefs negatively and without permission and provoke conversion into another religion of their own choice) and slamming those who engage in premarital s*x. The captain has also been charged with sharing lewd s*xual fantasies with Lizzo’s performers, simulating oral s*x, and publicly discussing the virginity of one of the plaintiffs.

As per their lawyer Ron Zambrano, Lizzo allegedly knew about the captain’s behavior but chose to do nothing about it. The lawsuit thus mentions Lizzo (whose real name is Melissa Viviane Jefferson), Quigley, and her production company Big Grrrl Big Touring Inc. as defendants. So far, none of them have commented on the lawsuit publicly.