Biography
Rosy Simas (enrolled member of the Seneca Nation) is a dance and transdisciplinary artist. Simas’ work weaves themes of personal and collective identity with family, sovereignty, and healing. Simas creates dance work with a team of Native and BIQTPOC artists, driven by movement-vocabularies developed through deep listening.
She is carried through her life and work by the many generations of family who were and are Seneca, Stockbridge-Munsee, Oneida, Mohawk, Cayuga, Onondaga, Neutral, and of European descent. This extensive knowledge of her family and lineage is the underpinning of her relationship to culture and history – stored in her body – which is expressed through her work – of moving people, moving image, and moving objects that she makes for stage and installation.
Simas’ dance works include Weave, Skin(s) and We Wait In The Darkness, which have toured throughout Turtle Island. Simas’ installations have been exhibited at the Seneca Iroquois National Museum, Colorado College, All My Relations Arts, and Soo Visual Art Center.
Simas is a Doris Duke Artist, a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Choreography Fellow, Guggenheim Creative Arts Fellow, McKnight Foundation Choreography Fellow, Dance/USA Fellow, USA Doris Duke Fellow, a recipient of a Joyce Award from The Joyce Foundation, a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation SHIFT award, as well as multiple awards from NEFA National Dance Project, the MAP Fund, and NPN.
Simas new work she who lives on the road to war premiered 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.
