Decolonization Rider

Emily is a Bessie Award-winning choreographer, Guggenheim, Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, United States Artists Fellow, and recipient of the Doris Duke Artist Award. She is based on Haudenosaunee lands and Lenapehoking / New York City. Emily belongs to the Yup’ik Nation, and since 1998 has created work that considers the experience of sensing and seeing performance. Her dances function as portals and care processions, they engage audienceship within and through space, time, and environment — interacting with a place’s architecture, peoples, history and role in building futures. Emily is trying to make a world where performance is part of life; where performance is an integral part of our connection to each other, our environment, our stories, our past, present and future.
Her choreography and gatherings have been presented across what is currently called the United States, Canada, and Australia. Her large-scale project, Then a Cunning Voice and A Night We Spend Gazing at Stars is an all-night outdoor performance gathering taking place amongst 84 community-hand-made quilts. It premiered in Lenapehoking (NYC) in 2017, and was presented in Zhigaagoong (Chicago) in 2019. She choreographed the Santa Fe Opera production of Doctor Atomic, directed by Peter Sellars in 2018. Her work Being Future Being premiered on Tongva Land in Los Angeles in 2022.

Emily hosts monthly ceremonial fires on Mannahatta in partnership with Abrons Arts Center and Karyn Recollet. She was the Pueblo Opera Cultural Council Diplomat at Santa Fe Opera 2018-2020, and a lead organizer of First Nations Dialogues. She was a co-compiler of the documents, Creating New Futures: Guidelines for Ethics and Equity in the Performing Arts and Notes for Equitable Funding, was a member of Creative Time’s inaugural Think Tank, and serves as co-lead for First Nations Performing Arts.

She has previously appeared at FTA in performative exchanges part of FTA Playgrounds activities: Gather In, a Speculative Architecture of the Overflow in 2023 and Umyuangvigkaq in 2022.

Since 2018, with the Conseil des arts de Montréal, she has focused on promoting and developing Indigenous arts by creating new funding programs and developing an equity policy to better support artistic communities. In 2020, as part of the anthology D’horizons et d’estuaires: Entre mémoires et créations autochtones, she published the essay N’tagam8bna maalhakws, co-authored with artist and curator France Trépanier. Guay was interim director of the Indigenous Curatorial Collective (ICCA) and co-curator of Turtle Island and the Great Ocean’s first program of French-language cinematic works, Écrans autochtones: temporalité et mouvement, which was presented at the 2020 edition of the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival.

Their artistic and curatorial practice prioritizes global Indigenous, Asian and Black visuality, sensual and spoken languages, and ceremonial-political practices.