Rosy Simas

Rosy Simas is Haudenosaunee. She is an enrolled member of the Seneca Nation of Indians. Simas is a dance and transdisciplinary artist and the Founder and Artistic Director of Rosy Simas Danse.

Rosy Simas creates work for stage and installation that unifies movement, time-based media, sound, and sculpture. Since 2012 she has collaborated with French composer François Richomme. Their collaborative works include: We Wait In The Darkness (2014); Skin(s) (2016); Weave(2019); Threshold, a film with photographer Douglas Beasley (2013); and WEave:HERE with Heid E. Erdrich (2019).

Solo

• We Wait In The Darkness, All My Relations Art, Minneapolis, MN. (2014)
• All My Relations: A Seneca History, Mitchell Museum of the American Indian (2015)
• Blood Lines: Images of Attachments, Seneca Iroquois National Museum, Salamanca, NY. (2020)
• she who lives on the road to war, Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, MN. (2020)

Group

• SKEW LINES: a residency and installations, Heid E. Erdrich and Rosy Simas. SOO Visual Arts Center, Minneapolis, MN. (2019)
• Waasamoo-Beshizi (Power-Lines), Plains Art Museum, Fargo, ND. (2019)
• Identity/Identify, Iroquois Indian Museum, Howes Cave, NY. (2020-2021)

• Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Artist Fellowship (2013)
• Twin Cities City Pages Artist of the Year (2014)
• Sage Award for Film and Set Design (2014)
• Guggenheim Creative Arts Fellowship for Choreography (2015)
• McKnight Fellowship for Choreography (2016)
• First People's Fund Artists in Business Leadership Fellow (2016)
• Joyce Award from the Joyce Foundation with the Ordway Center of the Performing Arts (2018)
• Dance/USA Artist Fellowships (2019)
• Twin Cities City Pages Best Choreographer (2020)
• McKnight Fellowship for Choreography (2022)
• United States Artists Artist Fellowship (2022)

• Simas, Rosy (2016) My Making of We Wait in the Darkness. Dance Research Journal, vol. 48 no. 1.
• Simas, Rosy and Bodhrán, Ahimsa Timoteo (2019) Sovereign Movements Building and Sustaining Native Dance And Performance Communities A Dialogue, Movement Research Performance Journal, Sovereign Movements: Native Dance and Performance, Issue 52/53, Fall 2019.
• Simas, Rosy and Morgan, Christopher K. (2019) Longer Scores: Native Choreographic Turns, Curatorial Visions, and Community Engagement
• Simas, Rosy and Mitchell, Sam (2019)Playing Indian, between Idealization and Vilification: Seems You have to Play Indian to be Indian. American Indian Culture and Research Journal, vol. 43 no.4.
• Simas, Rosy (2022) The body is an archive: Collective memory; ancestral knowledge, culture and history. Music, Dance and the Archive. Edited by Amanda Harris, Linda Barwick and Jakelin Troy