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Rosy is seated in front of a white backdrop. Rosy has medium brown skin, dark black eyes, and dark brown hair. Rosy looks at the viewer, body leaning forward and hands clasped together below the chin, wearing a black button-down shirt and multi-colored beaded hoop earrings.

Photo by Tim Rummelhoff; courtesy McKnight Fellowships for Choreographers.

Artists

Rosy Simas

She // Her // Hers

Transdisciplinary and Dance Artist

Mni Sota Makoce, Minnesota

Since the onset of the pandemics I have been driven to make space, hold space, and offer ideas on how we can rest in movement and find refuge for that rest. This has been critical in order to survive the onslaught of bigotry and violence so we can be creative.”

Rosy Simas, an enrolled member of the Seneca Nation, Heron clan, 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. 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 Center, and the Weisman Art Museum.

Simas has received numerous fellowships for dance and choreography, including from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation (NACF; 2013), the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (2015), the McKnight Foundation (2016), and Dance/USA (2019). Simas has also received a 2017 Joyce Award, a 2021 NACF SHIFT award, and multiple awards from the NEFA National Dance Project, the MAP Fund, and the National Performance Network.

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 at the University of Minnesota’s Weisman Art Museum.

Simas is the artistic director of Rosy Simas Danse and Three Thirty One Space, a creative studio for Native and BIPOC artists in Minneapolis.

Donor -This award was generously supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.

This artist page was last updated on: 07.12.2024

Rosy Simas. Weave, 2019.

A photograph of a dark performance space, hung with fabrics covered with abstract images that look like streaks of light or electricity.

Rosy Simas. yödoishëndahgwa'geh installation.

Photo courtesy of the artist.

Composite of a grid of vintage-appearing black-and-white photographs, arranged in three rows of four columns. The snapshots feature people holding young children, close ups of hands and faces.

Rosy Simas. Image from Blood Lines installation.

Photo courtesy of the artist.