Rosy Simas is a Haudenosaunee (Seneca, Heron Clan) artist based in Minneapolis. Simas has been honored by the Native community with a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Fellowship (2013), a First Peoples Fund Fellowship (2016), and residencies at the Banff Centre Indigenous Arts Program, All My Relations Arts, Full Circle’s Talking Stick Festival, and Institute of American Indian Arts’ Museum of Contemporary Native Arts. Simas is a Guggenheim (2015) and McKnight (2016) Choreography Fellow. Her work is supported nationally by the Knight Foundation’s Knight Arts Challenge; New England Foundation for the Arts National Dance Project, MAP Fund, and National Performance Network Creation Fund. “I am the fifth great-granddaughter of Chief Cornplanter and the fourth great-granddaughter of Chief Halftown and Governor Blacksnake. Along with the clan mothers who advised the chiefs, it is the diplomacy and commitment of my ancestors to the survival of our people that I AM HERE. My projects unify physical movement with time-based media, sound and objects for both stage and installation. In my choreography I unite cultural ideas and images with scientific theories to create work that is literal, abstract and metaphoric. My work positions Native cultural and political persistence to engage the personal and social, including identity, matriarchy, sovereignty, equality and the effects of war. To complement these themes, I make dances that decolonize bodies and develop movement vocabularies with the ability to oscillate between Indigenous and Eurocentric movement. By challenging contemporary dance conventions, I am advocating for the inclusion of an Indigenous worldview.”
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