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.

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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.

Esther Grisham Grimm

Esther’s career-long work in the arts encompasses museum and arts education, administration, philanthropy, and leadership coaching. For 23 years, she served as the Executive Director of 3Arts, a nonprofit grantmaking and arts service organization that supports artists in the six-county Chicago metropolitan area and Southern Illinois, with a focus on women artists, artists of color, and Deaf and disabled artists. Prior to that, she was the Director of Education/Associate Director of Marwen and the Assistant Director of Museum Education at The Art Institute of Chicago.

Esther is a writer and editor, flute player, equine therapy volunteer, and a leadership coach for National Arts Strategies. She serves on the City of Chicago’s Cultural Advisory Council and is a Co-Chair of the American Friends of the Vienna Museum Board of Directors.

In 2020, she was presented with the Diversity Award from the College Art Association. In 2017, she received the Kathryn V. Lamkey Spirit of Diversity Award from the Equal Employment Opportunity Committee of Actors’ Equity Association. Esther also received the Wren Award in honor of women in theater from Rivendell Theatre Ensemble and the Women Who Make a Difference Award from Lakeside Bank.

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.