Sam Aros-Mitchell is a Yaqui choreographer, cultural producer, scholar, and performer based in Minneapolis. His work moves between Indigenous cosmologies, experimental dance, and performance installation, activating space as a site of ceremony, resistance, and collective witnessing. He is a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow (2025–28), a McKnight Dance Fellow (2023), and the founder of SAROS field/works, a platform for Indigenous and BIPOC-led performance. For over eight years, he has also been a core collaborator with Rosy Simas Danse.

Aros-Mitchell’s choreography dissolves the boundaries between dance, theatre, and visual art. Rooted in Indigenous ontologies and land-based practice, his performances emerge from embodied research and ceremonial methodologies. He is among the first Yaqui artists to reconstruct and perform José Limón’s The Unsung (Deer Solo) and Danzas Mexicanas (Indio Solo), infusing these historic modernist works with Indigenous embodiment and critical recontextualization. Recent original works include Juya Nokakamea (2024), a multi-sensory performance drawn from Yaqui creation stories, and Entering Aniam (2023), an immersive sound and movement installation.

Born in Imperial Valley, California, Aros-Mitchell’s early life was shaped by the foster care system, adoption, and the borderland geographies of the Southwest. These experiences inform his work, which often engages the complexities of being a Native adoptee—displaced from, but never disconnected to, cultural knowledge and land. His choreography insists that the adopted Indigenous body is not incomplete but encoded, carrying ancestral memory and reanimating what was obscured.

He holds a PhD in Drama and Theatre from UC San Diego/UC Irvine and an MFA in Dance Theatre from UC San Diego. His dissertation, W/riting Indigeneity; Circularities through the Codices of the Native Body, theorizes performance as ceremonial code, where the body becomes an archive of survivance, memory, and cultural transmission. His current book project, Performance as Ceremony, extends this research, offering a framework for Indigenous performance theory grounded in fieldwork, rehearsal practice, and Yaqui epistemologies.

As an educator, Aros-Mitchell teaches Muscle/Bone technique (inspired by Min Tanaka’s Body Weather), somatic improvisation, and interdisciplinary courses on Indigenous performance and design. He has been a guest artist at Colorado College, UC Berkeley, Northwestern University, and Carleton College. His mentorship emphasizes Indigenous pedagogy, land-based research, and somatic justice.

Aros-Mitchell is also the founder of the NE/X Festival (North East Experimental): A Festival of Indigenous Performance and The Native Joy Play Festival: A Celebration of Indigenous Creativity and Community. He serves on the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) Council and is the founder of Aros & Son LLC, a Native-owned company he co-founded with his son to support Indigenous publishing, collaborative media projects, and mentorship.

His work has been supported by the Minnesota State Arts Board, Jerome Foundation, McKnight Foundation, Metro Regional Arts Council, and the Minneapolis Arts & Cultural Affairs Festival Activation Program. Across all projects, Aros-Mitchell’s practice is guided by kinship, ritual, and the belief that performance is not merely art—it is an embodied act of presence, memory, and cultural continuity.

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