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About Rosy

Rosy Simas is a transdisciplinary and dance artist. Simas grew up and lives and works in Mni Sota Makoce – unceded Dakota territory.

Simas an enrolled member of the Seneca Nation, Heron clan. 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’ work weaves themes of personal and collective identity with family, sovereignty, equality, and healing. Simas creates dance work with a team of Native artists and artists of color, 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. Simas’  installations have been exhibited at the Seneca Iroquois National Museum, All My Relations Arts, SOO Visual Arts, 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, a recipient of a 2017 Joyce Award from The Joyce Foundation, a 2021 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation SHIFT award and multiple awards from NEFA National Dance Project, the MAP Fund, and NPN.

In 2021 Simas was the Inaugural Pamela Beatty Mitchell Artist in Residence in Contemporary Dance at Colorado College, an artist in residence at Carleton College, and a returning artist in residence at the Target Studio for Creative Collaboration in the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota.

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.

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