Dr. Mishuana Goeman, Tonawanda Band of Seneca, is currently a Professor of Indigenous Studies at University of Buffalo (on leave from UCLA’s Gender Studies and American Indian Studies). Her monographs include Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) and the forthcoming Settler Aesthetics and the Spectacle of Originary Moments: Terrence Malick’s the New World (University of Nebraska Press). She is also part of the feminist editorial collective for Keywords in Gender and Sexuality Studies (NYU Press 2021). Her community-engaged work is devoted to several digital humanities projects, including participation as Co-PI on community-based digital projects, Mapping Indigenous L.A (2015), which gathers alternative maps of resiliency from Indigenous LA communities.  Carrying Our Ancestors Home (2019) is a site concentrating on better working tribal relationships and communications as it concerns repatriation and NAGPRA. She is the PI of the University of California President’s office multi-campus Research Grant for Centering Tribal Stories in Difficult Times. She also headed up the new Mukurtu California Native Hub housed at AISC through an NEH sub-grant, which supports local tribal organizations and nations to start their cultural heritage and language digitally sovereign sites through the Mukurtu platform. She also publishes widely in peer-reviewed journals and books, including guest-edited volumes on Native Feminisms and Indigenous Performances. Her work from 2018-2022 included holding the Inaugural Special Advisor position at UCLA, where she worked across campus to better Indigenous relationships. From 2020-2021 she was a Distinguished Visiting Scholar with the Center for Diversity Innovation at the University at Buffalo, located in her home territories.   

Dr. Joe Stahlman is the Director of Seneca Nation’s Onöhsagwë:de' Culture Center and Seneca Nation’s Tribal Historic Preservation Office. Joe is a scholar and researcher of Tuscarora descent. He has over 25 years of research experience working with First Peoples throughout the Americas. His research focuses on culture and history, as well as ongoing socio-economic and health & wellness related endeavors with Native communities. He takes an active role in addressing the spaces Indigenous Peoples occupy across the North American landscape. He talks on the need to promote equity, equality, and justice among all peoples through a number of reconciliatory processes which empowers people to express agency through creative and intellectual endeavors.

Rosy Simas, (enrolled member of the Seneca Nation) is a dance and transdisciplinary artist. Simas’ work weaves themes of personal and collective identity with family, sovereignty, and healing. Simas creates dance work with a team of Native and BIQTPOC artists, driven by movement-vocabularies developed through deep listening. She is carried through her life and work by the many generations of family who were and are Seneca, Stockbridge-Munsee, Oneida, Mohawk, Cayuga, Onondaga, Neutral, and of European descent. This extensive knowledge of her family and lineage is the underpinning of her relationship to culture and history – stored in her body – which is expressed through her work – of moving people, moving image, and moving objects that she makes for stage and installation. Simas’ dance works include Weave, Skin(s) and We Wait In The Darkness, which have toured throughout Turtle Island. Simas’ installations have been exhibited at the Seneca Iroquois National Museum, Colorado College, All My Relations Arts, and Soo Visual Art Center. Simas is a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Choreography Fellow, Guggenheim Creative Arts Fellow, McKnight Foundation Choreography Fellow, Dance/USA Fellow, USA Doris Duke Fellow, a recipient of a Joyce Award from The Joyce Foundation, a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation SHIFT award, as well as multiple awards from NEFA National Dance Project, the MAP Fund, and NPN. Simas is the Artistic Director of Rosy Simas Danse and three thirty one space, a creative studio for Native and BIPOC artists in Minneapolis.