2022 CHOREOGRAPHY FELLOW
Photo by Tim Rummelhoff
Rosy Simas is an enrolled member of the Seneca Nation. She is a transdisciplinary and dance artist who creates work for stage and installation.
Simas’ work weaves themes of personal and collective identity with family, sovereignty, equality, and healing. She creates dance work with a team of Native and BIQTPOC artists, driven by movement-vocabularies developed through deep listening.
Simas’ dance works include Weave, Skin(s) and We Wait In The Darkness, which have toured throughout Turtle Island. Her installations have been exhibited at the Seneca Iroquois National Museum, All My Relations Arts, SOO Visual Art Center, and the Weisman Art Museum.
Simas is a 2013 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Choreography Fellow, 2015 Guggenheim Creative Arts Fellow, 2016 McKnight Foundation Choreography Fellow, 2019 Dance/USA Fellow, 2022 USA Doris Duke Fellow, 2017 Joyce Award recipient from The Joyce Foundation, 2021 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation SHIFT award recipient, and has received multiple awards from NEFA National Dance Project, the MAP Fund, and National Performance Network.
Simas’ yödoishëndahgwa'geh (a place to rest) a micro-short film, performance, and installation, has been shared with audiences in New York City, Minneapolis, Colorado Springs, Miami, Niagara Falls, and Buffalo.
Simas’ upcoming work, she who lives on the road to war, will premiere in September 2022 at All My Relations Arts and the Target Studio for Creative Collaboration in the Weisman Art Museum, both in Minneapolis, and will tour Turtle Island in 2023–2024.
Simas is the Artistic Director of Rosy Simas Danse and three thirty one space, a creative studio for Native and BIPOC artists in Minneapolis, MN.