ROSY SIMAS

Rosy Simas is a transdisciplinary artist who historically has presented work as a choreographer.
Simas is Haudenosaunee, enrolled Seneca, Heron Clan. Her projects merge decolonized physical movement with media, sound, and objects for stage and installation. She unites cultural concepts and images with scientific and philosophical theories to create work that is literal, abstract, and metaphoric. Her work weaves themes of personal and collective identity with family, matriarchy, sovereignty, equality, and healing. She creates dance work with a team of Native artists and artists of color, driven by movement-vocabularies developed through deep listening.

Simas is a recipient of a Dance/USA Fellowship, Joyce Award from The Joyce Foundation, McKnight Fellowship for Choreography, Guggenheim Creative Arts Fellowship, First People Fund Fellowship, and a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Fellowship.
Her dance works include Weave, Skin(s) and We Wait In The Darkness which have toured Turtle Island and France with the support of NEFA National Dance Project, MAP Fund, and National Performance Network.

In 2021, Simas presented her dance, film and sculpture work-in-progress she who lives on the road to war at the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis. Her transitory work Transfuse, with composer François Richomme and dancer Sam Mitchell, was installed and performed at Colorado College in March 2020. Her exhibit Blood Lines of prints is currently on exhibit at the Seneca Iroquois National Museum. And she co-edited the first Indigenous issue of the Movement Research Performance Journal, Sovereign Movements, issue 52/53.

Simas is currently a guest choreographer in the Department of Theater and Dance at the University of South Carolina, In spring 2021, Simas was the inaugural choreographer of the Pamela Beatty Mitchell Residency in Contemporary Dance at Colorado College in the Department of Theater and Dance.

Simas participated in NCCAkron's 2021 Dancing Lab: Art Speaks 2.0, alongside Tara Burns, Megan Lowe, Kelsey Paschich, and Daiane Lopes da Silva and Weidong Yang of Kinetech Arts. The Lab was an extended dive into the relationship of artistic process, technology, and audience engagement.