Sam Aros-Mitchell

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.

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.

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.

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.

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), Juya Nokakamea (2024), a solo performance drawn from the Yaqui creation story of the talking tree; Ania Bwia Bwia Toochia (2023), a sound and movement installation;

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

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.

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 serve on the council of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association.

All of it is guided by kinship and by ritual, 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