2016 Choreographer Fellow
Photo credit: Tim Rummelhoff
Rosy Simas is an enrolled Seneca from the Heron clan. She is a Minneapolis based choreographer, engaged in the dance field as a performer, teacher, curator, lecturer, panelist, activist, advocate, and mentor to other Native artists and artists of color.
Simas is 2016 First Peoples Fund Fellow, a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, and a 2013 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Fellow. Her work is supported nationally by NEFA National Dance Project (2014, 2016), National Presenters Network (2015), and regionally by the Minnesota State Arts Board (2014, 2016) and the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council (2014). Her most recent work, We Wait In The Darkness, has toured to 14 cities and won a 2014 Minnesota SAGE Award for Performance and a 2014 City Pages Artist of the Year citation.
For more than 20 years Simas has created work dealing with a wide range of political, social and cultural subject matter from a Native feminist perspective. Her newest work Skin(s) is being developed in three regions -- the Twin Cities, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Chicago metropolitan area. Skin(s) explores what we hold, reveal, and perceive through our skin. Simas is examining the beauty and diversity of how Native people identify and the contradictions, pride, joy, pain, and sorrow that arise out of our many dimensions of identity. Skin(s) will open at Intermedia Arts in Minneapolis in October 2016.
Simas's main collaborator is French composer François Richomme. Together they work with Native artists and artists of color from many different disciplines.
Rosy Simas Touring Information