Eisha Love’s work spans documentary storytelling, television, criminal-justice and name-change advocacy, public speaking, and original media. This is the home for her story, body of work, impact, current projects, and bookings.
Eisha Love is a Chicago-based activist, storyteller, and media personality from the city’s West Side. Her advocacy grew from lived experience and expanded into a public mission centered on transgender equality, criminal-justice reform, visibility, and the right to self-definition.
Her work has reached audiences through Trans in America: Chicago Love, The Deadliest Year, public advocacy around Illinois name-change reform, work connected to The Chi, and the documentary project What’s in a Name. Today, her platform extends across film, television, speaking, advocacy, and original media.
Eisha’s platform brings together her advocacy, media work, public speaking, and storytelling in one place.
A timeline of Eisha Love’s publicly documented film, advocacy, legal-reform, and media work. Source links are included for the major public claims.
Eisha is the principal subject of the 2018 short documentary directed by Cary Cronenwett and produced by the ACLU and Little By Little Films. The film follows her rebuilding her life after incarceration while navigating employment, safety, identity, and reentry.
Following the documentary’s release, Eisha continued speaking publicly about life after incarceration, family, identity, and the realities faced by Black trans women.
During Pride Month 2020, Eisha was featured by the City of Chicago in the “Pride Is Showing Up for Others” campaign as a community activist. The campaign gave her advocacy a highly visible public platform across the city.
Eisha worked with a coalition that included Chicago House, ACLU of Illinois, Transformative Justice Law Project, Reyna Ortiz, and Tania Cordova to modernize Illinois name-change law. Public materials include Eisha’s House testimony describing the barriers created by the old law.
The Illinois General Assembly passed HB2542 on January 10, 2023. Governor J.B. Pritzker approved it on February 10, 2023, creating Public Act 102-1133, effective January 1, 2024. The reform removed the old blanket ten-year waiting period after many felony sentences while retaining specific safeguards.
Eisha is credited as herself in the 2023 television special The Deadliest Year, a project centered on the violence faced by transgender women and the lives too often lost without sufficient public attention.
Eisha has also appeared on Showtime’s Chicago drama The Chi. This production still now gives the credit a real visual. The exact role, season, and episode can be added when confirmed.
The feature documentary follows Eisha Love, Tania Cordova, and Reyna Ortiz as they challenge Illinois’ name-change restrictions through litigation and advocacy for HB2542. Film Fatales lists the project in post-production. The documentary remains a separate film project from the ACLU Illinois name-change campaign commercial featured below.
Eisha’s work in The Deadliest Year sits within a larger reality: transgender women, particularly Black and Brown trans women, have faced deadly violence while many of their stories received too little sustained attention. This section preserves the Windy City Times memorial coverage you provided and keeps the focus on the people whose lives were lost.
A curated mix of Eisha’s media work, public recognition, and personal brand photography.
A current professional portrait for press, speaking, partnerships, and media opportunities.
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Eisha’s personal platform brings together advocacy, storytelling, media, and public conversation under one recognizable voice.
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Eisha’s community advocacy was featured publicly in Chicago during Pride Month 2020.
See the timeline →A selection of Eisha’s advocacy and media work presented in its original framing so the people on screen remain fully visible.
A preserved video from Eisha’s public advocacy and media history, reflecting her continued work around visibility, self-definition, and transgender rights.
Visit ACLU Illinois ↗Advocacy media connected to the effort to remove barriers in Illinois name-change law and protect the right to live under one’s own identity.
See the advocacy timeline →Campaign media tied to the Illinois name-change reform effort and the larger fight for dignity, identity, and self-definition.
See the policy impact →
Surviving Unicorn is Eisha’s current podcast and media project, centered on survival, healing, justice, and the lived experiences of transgender people and communities too often pushed to the margins.
CeCe McDonald is a nationally recognized transgender activist, speaker, and advocate whose story became a major point of conversation around race, gender identity, self-defense, and the criminal legal system. After surviving a racist and transphobic attack, her case drew national and international attention and helped galvanize support for transgender women of color facing violence and criminalization.
Following her release from incarceration in 2014, CeCe turned that public attention into advocacy for transgender rights, racial justice, prison reform, and the right of marginalized people to live safely and define themselves on their own terms. Her story was chronicled in the documentary FREE CeCe, and her work has been recognized through national media, public speaking, The Advocate’s 40 Under 40, and the Bayard Rustin Civil Rights Award.
As Eisha’s co-host on Surviving Unicorn, CeCe brings candor, resilience, lived experience, and a fearless commitment to conversations about survival, healing, justice, and community.
Support from Eisha’s community helps strengthen independent storytelling, media projects, advocacy, public conversations, appearances, travel, and the resources needed to keep building work with impact.
For speaking engagements, interviews, television and documentary opportunities, panels, appearances, partnerships, and collaborations, contact Eisha’s team.
