Bear Robe, Santa Fe, NM

May 8-11, 2025, Founder/Executive Director

Native Fashion Week Santa Fe (NFW) celebrates the artistry, innovation and heritage of Indigenous fashion designers and artists, creating a dynamic platform that aims to elevate Indigenous fashion on a global stage. Through runway shows, fashion parties, interactive pop-up experiences, and symposia, NFW amplifies Indigenous perspectives in fashion, fosters connections between designers, audiences, and industry leaders, and honors both the rich traditions and the evolving future of Indigenous fashion.

Created and directed by Bear Robe, this highly anticipated event is presented in partnership with Jam Productions CO and the Santa Fe Independent Film Institute.

The Getty, Los Angeles, CA

September 30, 2024, Fashion Show Curator

Looking Into the Future(s) with PST ART, five leading Indigenous fashion designers—Jason Baerg, Orlando Dugi, Jontay Kahm, Caroline Monnet, Jamie Okuma— will present their work on a runway at the Getty Center on September 30. The event will also feature a special activation by Virgil Ortiz. Organized in collaboration with the Autry Museum and Fashion Curator Amber-Dawn Bear Robe, the runway show will celebrate the artists’ blend of innovative couture, ancestral knowledge, and future-forward style. This one-night-only event will bring to life looks on view at the Autry Museum’s Art & Science Collide exhibition Future Imaginaries: Indigenous Art, Fashion, Technology.

The Autry Museum, Los Angeles, CA

Opened September 2024, Co-Curator

Future Imaginaries explores the rising use of Futurism in contemporary Indigenous art as a means of enduring colonial trauma, creating alternative futures, and advocating for Indigenous technologies in a more inclusive present and sustainable future. By intermingling science fiction, self-determination, and Indigenous technologies across a diverse array of Native cultures, Future Imaginaries envisions sovereign futures while countering historical myths and the ongoing impact of colonization, including environmental degradation and toxic stereotypes.

Published November 2024, Contributer

Published by the University of Washington Press in collaboration with the Autry Museum of the American West.

Edited by Amy Scott

Explores some of the dynamic, forward-facing artistic creations of Indigenous Futurism

The growing field of Indigenous Futurism eludes easy categorization, as suggested by this lavishly illustrated wide-ranging collection of essays and artworks from scholars, curators, and some of the field’s most prominent artists. Exploring the field’s main themes and the opportunities it holds for a more shared, just, and sustainable world, their writings offer a combination of scholarly, artistic, and first-person assessments of Indigenous Futurism as a creative and art historical field of consequence. At the same time, they speak to its interdisciplinary nature and its impact on subjects as diverse as film, fashion, science fiction, popular culture, and environmental science. Throughout these pages, we imagine future worlds grounded in culture, crafted with style, informed by experience, and unbound by colonial restraints. In these worlds are lessons for all of us, today.

SWAIA, Santa Fe, NM

August 2014 - August 2024, Founder/Producer

The annual SWAIA Native Fashion show is Southwestern Association for Indian Arts (SWAIA) programming. Created and produced by Bear Robe, the first show premiered during SWAIA Market 2014. In 2024, the show is a staple at the Santa Fe Indian Market, drawing a huge audience and international recognition.

SWAIA, Santa Fe, NM

May 2-5, 2024, Founder/Producer

SWAIA Native Fashion Week is a four-day event in May showcasing the diversity of Indigenous designers. SNFW is the place for Native fashion artists, models, fashion lovers, and the fashion industry to collaborate, connect, and forge alliances. In 2024, Bear Robe produced the inaugural SNFW—the very first U.S. Indigenous fashion week.

CAFA, Toronto, ON

October 14, 2023, Curator

Fashion provides spaces for fantasy and dreams while being a powerful tool in society that can radically alter the world we see around us.

By acting as knowledge carriers for generations of Native North Americans, Indigenous designers have been fashioning extraordinary clothing and personal adornments for millennia, imprinted with the makers' values, memories and world views.

Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC

May - October 2023, Contributing Curator

Fashion Fictions surveys experimental design practices that exist at the intersection of fashion and other modes of cultural production. International in scope, the exhibition explores the increasing influence of research-based, materially driven practices on the global fashion scene, while acknowledging the proliferation of creative practices that challenge the aesthetic, material and technological conventions of fashion. The title of the exhibition is drawn from artist and technologist Julian Bleecker’s influential essay “Design Fiction” (2009) in which he extends the term first coined by critic and theorist Bruce Sterling to argue that the most innovative, transformative work is produced in the spaces between fact and fiction, the present and the near future, and the scientific and the fantastical. All of the designers in Fashion Fictions occupy these liminal spaces, using fashion as a means to unite seemingly disparate sentiments and to propose new possibilities for aesthetics, bodily forms and, more ambitiously, how we exist in the world.

Published 2023, Contributor

Published by the Vancouver Art Gallery and Information Office.

Edited by: Stephanie Rebick

Subverting the conventions of the fashion magazine, this heavily illustrated magazine-style publication will feature a curatorial essay by Stephanie Rebick, essays by exhibition collaborators Amber-Dawn Bear Robe, Hélène Day Fraser and Keith Doyle, as well as photo essays and short texts covering the themes explored in the exhibition.

Published 2022, Contributor

Published by the University of Arkansas Press

Edited by Michelle Tolini Finamore

Fashioning America: Grit to Glamour celebrates the history of American attire, from the cowboy boot to the zoot suit. From dresses worn by First Ladies to art-inspired garments to iconic moments in fashion that defined a generation, Fashioning America showcases uniquely American expressions of innovation, spotlighting stories of designers and wearers that center on opportunity and self-invention, and amplifying the voices of those who are often left out of dominant fashion narratives.

MoCNA, Santa Fe, NM

August 2022, Guest Curator

The Art of Indigenous Fashion offers insights into the approaches and perspectives of Indigenous designers beyond the visual and material qualities of their work. Indigenous designers have been fashioning clothing and personal adornment for millennia and can be considered the original haute couture artists of the Americas. Historically, Indigenous garments are one-of-a-kind and custom made.

MoCNA, Santa Fe, NM

August 2012 - August 2013, Founder/Producer

Fashion Heat brought Indigenous fashion to the runway in Santa Fe, NM, showcasing the vibrant, innovative designs of Indigenous designers who are redefining contemporary fashion. This Indigenous fashion show was founded and produced by Amber-Dawn Bear Robe and presented in partnership with MoCNA and the Santa Fe International Film Festival. As the first event of its kind, FASHION HEAT was a groundbreaking celebration of culture, innovation, and community.