Sam Aros-Mitchell

I am a Yaqui choreographer, performer, scholar, and cultural producer. I am an enrolled member of the Texas Band of Yaqui Indians. I was born in Imperial Valley, California, and my early life was shaped by the foster care system, by adoption, and by the borderland geographies of the Southwest. I came toward cultural knowledge sideways and late, and I have spent years walking back toward it.

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That route is in the work. Much of what I make asks what it means to be a Native adoptee, displaced from land and language but never disconnected from them. I don't believe the adopted Indigenous body is incomplete. I believe it is encoded. It carries ancestral memory whether or not it was ever handed the vocabulary, and performance is where I reanimate what has been obscured.

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I call my practice Performance as Ceremony. It treats performance as a living site of relation: not a picture of something, but an encounter between body and land, memory and time, the performer and the people in the room. Ceremony here does not mean reenactment, and it does not mean spectacle. It means a process through which relationships are renewed. The work moves across dance, theatre, and visual art without much regard for the borders between them; choreography, immersive installation, sound and light design, and embodied writing all belong to the same practice.

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I am among the first Yaqui artists to reconstruct and perform José Limón's The Unsung (Deer Solo) and Danzas Mexicanas (Indio Solo), working with Dante Puleio, Director of the Limón Dance Company. I am proud that Limón and I share Yaqui ancestry. To dance those solos as a Yaqui person is not preservation, it is a return of the work to the kind of body it came from.

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My original works include:

Juya Nokakamea (2026), an immersive performance with an ensemble, drawn from the Yaqui creation story of the talking tree

 

WISH | BODY | TRACE (2026), a study in attentional emergence and collective form

 

The Wall is High: A Performance in five Chapters (2025), a solo

 

Juya Nokakamea (2024), a solo performance drawn from the Yaqui creation story of the talking tree

 

Ania Bwia Bwia Toochia (2023), a solo sound and movement installation.

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Since 2017 I have been a core collaborator with Rosy Simas Danse as a performer, teacher, and community engagement organizer:

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Skin(s) (2016–2018), performer. Eastside Arts Alliance, Oakland, California

AICHO Duluth, Minnesota

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Weave (2018–2020), performer, text, and community engagement.

Premiered January 2019 at the Ordway Center in St. Paul.

tours to Birmingham, Alabama

Atmore, Alabama

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Maui Arts and Cultural Center, Kahului, Hawaii

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WEave:HERE (2019), performer. Northern Spark, Minneapolis, with Heid E. Erdrich.

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yödoishëndahgwa'geh (a place to rest) (2021), sole performer in Rosy Simas's micro-short film, premiered at All My Relations Arts. Screened in the Haudenosaunee Micro-Short Film Program at the Seneca Nation Casino in Niagara Falls and the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, and installed at Colorado College.

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she who lives on the road to war (2022–2024), performer.

Dual premiere at the Weisman Art Museum and All My Relations Arts.

Oneida Arts, Wisconsin

Maui Arts and Cultural Center, Kahului, Hawaii

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A:gajë:gwah dësa'nigöëwë:nye:' (i hope it will stir your mind) (2025–2026), performer. Rosy Simas's Walker Art Center commission, part of the ongoing Mind of Peace (O'nigöëiyosde:') project. Walker Art Center, McGuire Theater, May 13–16, 2026

 

Developed in the Pillow Lab at Jacob's Pillow in April 2025, where Rosy Simas Danse was the season's closing resident artist.  

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Writing is not separate from any of this. My dissertation, W/riting Indigeneity: Circularities through the Codices of the Native Body, theorizes performance as ceremonial code, the body as an archive of survivance, memory, and cultural transmission. My current book project, Performance as Ceremony, extends that research into a framework for Indigenous performance theory grounded in fieldwork, rehearsal practice, and Yaqui epistemologies.

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I founded SAROS field/works, a platform for Indigenous and BIPOC-led performance; the NE/X Festival (North East Experimental), a festival of Indigenous performance; and the Native Joy Play Festival. With my son Max, I founded Aros & Son, a Native-owned company supporting Indigenous publishing, collaborative media, and mentorship.

 

I proudly serve on the council of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, am the online editor for Theater Journal and am a board member with MCA (Minnesota Citizens for the Arts).

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All of this is guided by kinship, and by the conviction that performance is not merely art. It is an embodied act of presence, memory, and cultural continuity.

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Fellowships & Honors

• Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, 2025–28

• McKnight Dance Fellow, 2023

• Heller Center Indigenous Fellow, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs

• Artist-in-Residence, Indigenous Performing Arts Residency, UC Berkeley Arts Research Center, 2026

• Artist-in-Residence, New Works Festival, Center for Performing Arts, Minneapolis, 2026

My work has been supported by the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Jerome Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, and the City of Minneapolis Arts & Cultural Affairs Department.

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Education

Ph.D., Drama and Theatre, joint doctoral program, UC San Diego / UC Irvine

M.F.A., Dance Theatre, UC San Diego

B.F.A., Dance, UC Santa Barbara

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Teaching & Speaking

I teach Muscle/Bone, a technique inspired by Min Tanaka's Body Weather that prepares the body through attention, grounding, and physical listening. Alongside it I teach somatic improvisation and interdisciplinary courses on Indigenous performance and design. My mentorship emphasizes Indigenous pedagogy, land-based research, and somatic justice.

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Recent guest artist and teaching engagements include UC Berkeley, Northwestern University, Colorado College, Carleton College, and Macalester College, where I served as Visiting Assistant Professor in Theater.

I am available for

• Masterclasses in Muscle/Bone and somatic improvisation

• Lecture-performances, including Performance as Ceremony 

• University and festival residencies

• Guest lectures on Indigenous performance theory, embodied archives, and Limón reconstructions