Sam Aros-Mitchell is a Yaqui choreographer, cultural producer, scholar, and performer based in Minneapolis. Working across Indigenous cosmologies, experimental dance, and performance installation, he activates space as a site of ceremony and resistance. His work is shaped by embodied research and rooted in Indigenous ontologies, phenomenological landings, and land-based practice. Aros-Mitchell is the founder of SAROS field/works, a platform for Indigenous and BIPOC-led performance, and has been a core collaborator with Rosy Simas Danse for eight years. He is a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow for 2025–2028 and a 2023 McKnight Dance Fellow whose recent works include Juya Nokakamea (2024), a multi-sensory performance drawn from Yaqui creation stories, and Entering Aniam (2023), an immersive sound and movement installation.

 

Aros-Mitchell’s work dissolves traditional boundaries between dance, theatre, and visual art. Inspired by performance as a mode of both spiritual inquiry and social engagement, he uses choreographic language to explore memory, transformation, and the complexities of Native survivance. Informed by both modernist legacies and Indigenous ways of knowing, his work blends experimental dramaturgy with somatic and ceremonial methodologies. He is one of the first Yaqui artists to reconstruct and perform José Limón’s The Unsung (Deer Solo) and Danzas Mexicanas (Indio Solo), infusing these mid-20th century works with Indigenous embodiment and critical recontextualization.

 

Raised in Imperial, California, Aros-Mitchell’s early experiences were shaped by the foster care system, adoption, and the borderland geographies of the Southwest. Adopted by Mitchell family in the early 1970s, his relationship to heritage, belonging, and embodiment has always been complex and layered. His work often addresses the contradictions of being a Native adoptee—displaced from but never disconnected from cultural knowledge, language, and land. These tensions form the basis of his embodied inquiry: how does one carry ancestral memory when the paths to it have been obscured? How can performance re-open those paths—not through reenactment, but through movement, ceremony, and care?

 

His practice insists that the adopted Indigenous body is not incomplete but encoded, capable of remembering, reforming, and reanimating what was taken. In this way, Aros-Mitchell’s choreography has taken a methodological approach for reinhabiting the body as a site of cultural continuity. 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, traces performance as ceremonial code, where the body becomes an archive for survivance, remembering, and cultural transmission.

 

Aros-Mitchell’s current book project, Performance as Ceremony, deepens this inquiry, articulating a field-based Indigenous performance theory shaped by lived experience, critical analysis, and ceremonial practice. The book gathers case studies, embodied methodologies, and reflections from the rehearsal studio, the land, and the performance space. It asks: how can performance return us to a rhythm of relationality? How do Native bodies carry knowledge not only across generations, but across movement, breath, silence, and song? Drawing from Yaqui epistemologies and his collaborations with Indigenous artists across the continent, the book offers a framework for understanding performance not as metaphor, but as praxis—ceremonial, material, and alive.

 

Aros-Mitchell’s collaborations span continents and disciplines: from dancing with the José Limón Company to working with Indigenous artists like Tanya Lukin Linklater and Rosy Simas. His movement-based collaborations often unfold in layered environments dense with sound, shadow, light, and ancestral resonance, offering portals for collective witnessing. He has presented work at institutions such as the Red Eye Theater, 331 Space, Weitz Center for Creativity, The O’Shaughnessy Theater, and Molli and Arthur Wagner Dance Studio 3 Theater, and will be a guest artist at Colorado College, UC Berkeley, Northwestern University, and Carleton College.

 

As an educator and mentor, Aros-Mitchell centers Indigenous pedagogy, land-based research, and somatic justice. He teaches Muscle/Bone technique (inspired by Min Tanaka’s Body Weather), somatic improvisation, and interdisciplinary studio courses on Indigenous performance and design. He is the founder of the NE/X (North East Experimental): A Festival of Indigenous Performance, the founder of The Native Joy Play Festival: A Celebration of Indigenous Creativity and Community and serves on the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) Council. Alongside his artistic work, Aros-Mitchell is director of Aros & Son LLC, a Native-owned company he founded with his son. The company serves as an umbrella for creative, editorial, and consulting work, supporting Indigenous publishing, collaborative media projects, and mentorship. Recent projects under Aros & Son include the publication of poetry by Manny Moreno Monolin through Aros & Son Press. The company embodies a generational approach to creative practice—one rooted in kinship, sovereignty, and Indigenous authorship.

 

His work has been supported by the Minnesota State Arts Board, Jerome Foundation, the Minneapolis Arts & Cultural Affairs Festival Activation Program, McKnight Foundation, and the Metro Regional Arts Council.

 

In all his work, Aros-Mitchell is guided by kinship, ritual, and the assertion that performance is not merely art—it is an embodied act of presence, memory, and cultural continuity.