Symone Wilson (all pronouns)
Having worked with a spectrum of arts organizations within Minnesota, Symone is grateful for the opportunity to support ECI. At the intersection of arts and business, Symone is a record label co-owner and avid pop musician, utilizing her expertise in event organizing and marketing to assist organizations with new ideas and structure. 

With her experience in performance and event production, she seeks to assist in creating collaboration between art forms, mentorship opportunities for burgeoning artists, and systems for support across Minnesota’s creative communities and organizations.

There are currently no job opportunities. Sign up for our newsletter to stay updated.

Esther Callahan is a Minnesota based independent curator and arts consultant. Curatorially she is interested in issues of decolonization, equity and representation, specifically relating to women and Black diaspora in all spaces. Over the past 20+ years in the Twin Cities, she has created and co-created various platforms for cultural production rooted in interrogating the impact of racial and gender equity. She is the former Co-Director of the Emerging Curator Institute (ECI), a Minnesota based nonprofit designed to build the individual practices of emerging curators from diverse backgrounds. In addition to ECI, Callahan was a Curatorial Fellow at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia), where she co-founded the Curatorial Advisory Committee as a model to help inform Diversity, Equity, Accessibility and Inclusion practice in curatorial work. She is also the Co-Artistic Director for Arts & Rec US, a design and development company in Mpls. She is interested in bringing art and artists into space and place – whether it be your home, a hotel, or a gallery.

Jehra Patrick is an accomplished arts leader with a record of creating valuable systems of support for artists and innovative public programming. Her experience includes founding arts organizations, guiding strategic transitions, fundraising, managing teams, creating educational programs for all ages, and building advocacy for the arts through boards and committees, writing, and frequent public speaking. She is the founding Director of the Emerging Curators Institute and she continues to support the organization through advisory work and advocacy.

Jehra currently works as Executive Director at Highpoint Center for Printmaking, where she focuses on the vision and mission, creating stronger relationships and engaging opportunities for artists and leaners. Prior to joining Highpoint, she was Gallery Director and Curator at Macalester College, where she developed an exhibition program that emphasized multicultural voices and a wide variety of engagement programs. Previously, she provided strategic direction for Mn Artists, a long-standing, state-wide program of the Walker Art Center. She also founded and directed Waiting Room, an exhibition and public programming space in Minneapolis. She actively exhibited as a studio artist for 15 years and brings this empathetic perspective into her work with artists. She is the mother of two young daughters enjoys spending time with family, cooking, traveling, and seeing art.

Dr. Amit S. Rai is Reader in Creative Industries and Arts Organising at Queen Mary, University of London, where he has also taught critical marketing studies and business ethics. He is author of Rule of Sympathy: Race, Sentiment, Power 1760-1860 (Palgrave, 2002) and Untimely Bollywood: Globalization and India’s New Media Assemblage (Duke UP, 2009). He has taught at the New School for Social Research, Florida State University, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, the Dutch Art Institute, and Lorton Maximum Security Prison. His current research touches on critical management and organizational studies of the creative and cultural industries in the UK and India, with a specific focus on the politics and infrastructures of care and accessibility, decolonizing organizational attention, emergent conversations between postcolonial theory, decoloniality, and the Black radical tradition, the gendering of affective labor in social reproduction in India, media practices of commoning, and hacking and piracy practices in the UK and South Asia. His monograph on work-around practices in Indian urban digital ecosystems, Jugaad Time: Ecologies of Everyday Hacking in India, was published in 2019 by Duke University Press.

Rosy Simas is a transdisciplinary and dance artist. She lives and works in Mni Sota Makoce (Minneapolis, MN).

Simas is an enrolled member of the Seneca Nation, Heron clan. Her knowledge of her Haudenosaunee 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 images, and moving objects that she makes for stage and installation. 

Simas’ work weaves personal and collective identity themes with family, sovereignty, equality, and healing. Simas creates dance work with a team of Native and BIPOC artists, driven by movement-vocabularies developed through deep listening.

Simas’ dance works include she who lives on the road to war, Weave, Skin(s), and We Wait in the Darkness, which have toured throughout Turtle Island. Simas’ installations have been exhibited at the Onöhsagwë:de’ Cultural Center, All My Relations Arts, SOO Visual Arts, and the Weisman Art Museum.

Simas has been honored as a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Choreography Fellow (2013), Guggenheim Creative Arts Fellow (2015), McKnight Foundation Choreography Fellow (2016, 2022), Dance/USA Fellow (2018), a Joyce Awardee from the Joyce Foundation (2018), United States Artists Fellow (2022), and as a Doris Duke Artist Awardee (2023).

Her other accolades include a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation SHIFT award and multiple awards from New England Foundation for the Arts National Dance Project, the MAP Fund, and National Performance Network.

Simas is the artistic director of Rosy Simas Danse (RSD) and RSD Studios’ creative spaces for Native, Black, Indigenous, and artists of color. She is a 2023-2024 Visiting Distinguished Scholar at the University at Buffalo.

Raven Davis is an Anishinaabe, 2-Spirit, multidisciplinary artist, curator, educator, mediator, and human rights speaker whose mother is from Treaty Four, Manitoba. Davis was born and raised in Michi Saagig Territory, Toronto, Ontario. Davis weaves their passions for land-based and archival research, with calls to action, movement and sound healing, and works embodied by lived and intergenerational experience. A parent of three sons, Davis works within the mediums of performance, movement, visual arts, and sound/media. Davis fuses narratives of colonization, race, gender, disability, abolition, pleasure, and 2-Spirit/Indigiqueer identity in their work. Davis’ performance practice bravely embodies their relationship to colonial systems, police and medical violence, systemic oppression, and complex histories. As an extension of their responsibilities as a Land and spiritual practitioner, and as a way to reconcile the hardships of the aforementioned, Davis creates spaces using sound, plant medicine, prayer, and body work to support individuals on their healing journeys.