Pillow Lab:
Rosy Simas

Rosy Simas

Developmental Residency | March 26 – April 5, 2025
Invited Showing | TBA

Simas (Seneca Nation, Heron clan) is a transdisciplinary and dance artist. Her knowledge of her Haudenosaunee family and lineage is the underpinning of her relationship to culture and history—stored in her body and expressed through her work—of moving people, images, and objects that she makes for stage and installation. Her work weaves personal and collective identity themes with family, sovereignty, equality, and healing. Simas creates with a team of Native and BIPOC artists.

During her residency, Simas will develop a new work that evokes her ancestors, their peacemaking, and their diplomacy to bring people together in action and rest. Her Haudenosaunee ancestors created the Great Law of Peace, a guide that united warring nations long before the founding of the United States. The words, methods, and actions of the Haudenosaunee served as a model for the creation of the U.S. Constitution. For this project, Simas returns to Haudenosaunee stories, ideas, and actions as a means to find peace and create a space that stirs the heart and mind—a place of rest for Native / BIPOC / LGBTQIA+ people in this time of divisive politics, bigotry, racism, and loss of life.

Throughout the cycles of the creative process, Simas will work with other Haudenosaunee artists, scholars, and community members, considering what parts of their ideas, stories, and words about peace should be shared with others—a critical question as they guard their culture against continual extraction from settler-colonialism. Simas creates content for Native audiences and then invites broader audiences into the space, offering content that deepens intimacy between everyone present. Her work is designed to be experienced in multiple ways: as installation/exhibition, performance, writing, and through community dialogue, gathering, and meal-sharing.

Simas is a Doris Duke Artist, Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, McKnight Foundation Fellow, Dance/USA Fellow, United States Artists Fellow, and a Joyce Awardee. Her other accolades include a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation SHIFT award and multiple awards from the New England Foundation for the Arts National Dance Project, the MAP Fund, and the National Performance Network. Simas is also the Artistic Director of Rosy Simas Danse and is currently an artist in residence at the Walker Art Center.

Rosy Simas’s new work is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project co-commissioned by Walker Art Center, Jacob’s Pillow, and NPN. The Creation & Development Fund is supported by the Doris Duke Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency). For more information: www.npnweb.org