The Emergence Room

T.J. Dedeaux-Norris
  • 5.0 (5)
  • Arts
  • Updated Semiweekly

Hosted by TJ Dedeaux-Norris & Jason Šimánek. Conversations on art, care, creativity, and what it means to emerge.

  1. 6d ago

    Michela Palermo

    In this episode of The Emergence Room, we sit down with Michela Palermo, an artist, photographer, publisher, and the 2025–26 Fondazione Sicilia Affiliated Artist at the American Academy in Rome. She is also the founder of Palermo Publishing, an independent publishing project working across photography, visual art, and critical thought. We talk with Michela about her emergent journey through photography and publishing, and the ways her practice has expanded from making her own work to creating structures for working with and alongside other artists. Our conversation moves through feminism, collaboration, autonomy, authorship, and what it means to take greater agency over how creative work is made, framed, documented, and circulated. During Open Studios at the American Academy, Michela brought these ideas to life through books, catalogues, photographs, and printed matter, revealing publishing as much more than a record of what has already happened. A publication can capture a particular moment, preserve the thinking and creative practices of a time, and become a reference point through which we can look back and consider what has changed, what has endured, and what remains unresolved. Together, we explore publishing as an artistic and collaborative practice in its own right, the relationships that form around making and sharing work, and what can emerge when artists claim greater authorship over the ways their stories, ideas, and creative histories enter the world.

    Michela Palermo

  2. Jul 9

    Samiya Bashir

    New episode of The Emergence Room featuring Samiya Bashir. Poet, multimedia artist, educator, trailblazer, and the first Black woman to receive the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature at the American Academy in Rome.   We talked about poetry as a living architecture. About queer women navigating institutions while becoming "the first" in rooms not originally built for them. About leadership, visibility, survival, and the strange emotional terrain of trailblazing while still trying to remain human inside it all. Samiya reflected on receiving the Rome Prize just before the pandemic disrupted the world, and the difficult moment when the Academy made the painful decision to send fellows home during COVID.   We discussed what it meant to return later as a Visiting Fellow, not simply as a continuation, but as a kind of healing. A re-entry. A chance to resolve unfinished conversations with Rome, with memory, and with the self that had been interrupted mid-dream. There was a connective tissue throughout the conversation around diaspora, embodiment, poetry, mentorship, and what it means to create while also being created by the worlds we move through. Her Rome Prize project, MAPS :: a cartography in progress, explored movement, family history, and multimedia poetry across cultural geographies.   This episode feels like sitting inside a poem while the city hums outside the window.

    Samiya Bashir

  3. Jun 25

    Iman Fayyad

    On this episode of The Emergence Room, we had the pleasure of talking with educator, researcher, and designer Iman Fayyad, whose work moves through conceptual drawing, sustainability, pedagogy, and spatial imagination with remarkable energy and curiosity. Our conversation moved between architecture and identity, teaching and movement, drawing and politics. We talked about the love of conceptual drawing as a way of thinking through space and possibility, and about the deep commitment required to teach and mentor within creative fields. Iman spoke beautifully about design not simply as construction, but as a living relationship between people, memory, environment, and future worlds still being imagined. We also discussed the politics of origin and the loaded question of where someone "comes from." Iman reflected on the complexity carried inside geography, displacement, identity, and perception, and the ways those realities shape how one moves through institutions and public space. Listeners will quickly hear that Iman is a complete force of energy: curious, generous, deeply thoughtful, and always in motion. Much of her time at the American Academy in Rome has been spent moving through architectural spaces with intense curiosity, examining how ancient and contemporary structures can inform new ways of living together. Outside of her professional work, some of her favorite hobbies include running and foam rolling, which somehow feels perfectly aligned with her thoughtful attention to movement, endurance, and care. This episode felt expansive, thoughtful, fast-moving, and deeply hopeful. A conversation about space, embodiment, teaching, identity, movement, and the possibility of building more humane futures through design itself.

    Iman Fayyad

  4. Jun 18

    Jefferson Pinder

    On this episode of The Emergence Room, we had the pleasure of talking with performance artist Jefferson Pinder, 2026 Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome, whose work moves between performance, sculpture, video, theater, ritual, and social history with extraordinary emotional and political force.  Cohost T.J. Dedeaux-Norris recently had the opportunity to perform collaboratively with Jefferson at the Centro Pecci Museum in Prato, Italy, during a performance titled Unsettled Matters, a work that pushed the emotional and physical boundaries of performance between the two artists in ways that felt both deeply vulnerable and transformative. The conversation reflects not only Jefferson's remarkable artistic practice, but also a friendship and creative dialogue that has unfolded over more than a decade through shared meals, performances, exhibitions, and ongoing conversations about art and life. We talked about Jefferson growing up in the suburbs, attending a Quaker school, his early love of theater and rehearsal, and the ways performance became a language for exploring identity, race, memory, and collective experience. He also reflected on the influence of his father, a political speechwriter, and how language, persuasion, storytelling, and public performance shaped his understanding of communication from an early age. Throughout the episode, Jefferson speaks about performance not simply as spectacle, but as a space of tension, release, embodiment, improvisation, and care. There's something deeply moving about the way he talks about rehearsal itself: not only preparing for performance, but living inside process, uncertainty, repetition, and trust. This conversation felt expansive, grounded, funny, thoughtful, and deeply human. A reflection on friendship, performance, memory, Blackness, experimentation, and the strange intimacy that can emerge through collaborative artistic practice.

    Jefferson Pinder

  5. Jun 11

    Katharine Ogle

    The Emergence Room

    Katharine Ogle

  6. Jun 4

    Adam Summers

    On this episode of The Emergence Room, we had the pleasure of talking with Adam Summers, scientist, educator, explorer, and 2026 Rome Prize Fellow in Environmental Arts & Humanities at the American Academy in Rome. Adam can almost always be found somewhere around the Academy wearing one of his now iconic fish shirts, which at this point feel less like clothing and more like a long-running conceptual art piece disguised as field biology.  Our conversation moved through some wonderfully unexpected territory: flying airplanes, 3D printing, fish anatomy, poetry workshops, childhood homes, memory, collaboration, privilege, and curiosity itself. Adam reflected on how the home he grew up in shaped his understanding of the world and spoke candidly about recognizing his own privilege and the importance of sharing access, resources, and knowledge with others through his lab and collaborative work. We also talked about poetry and the surprising intersections between scientific inquiry and creative practice. Adam shared stories about taking poetry classes and being pushed to write poems, embracing uncertainty and metaphor in ways that expanded how he thinks about observation and discovery. Listeners may also recognize Adam as the collaborator of poet Katharine Ogle, whose episode recently aired on The Emergence Room. Their collaborative project, Piscis Romana, merges poetry, ecology, Roman history, and marine biology into a playful and deeply thoughtful exploration of fish and fishlike forms throughout the city of Rome.  This episode felt expansive, generous, funny, and slightly delightfully unhinged in the best way. Adam has the energy of someone perpetually wandering toward an interesting idea just to see what might happen there next.

    Adam Summers

  7. May 28

    Peter N. Miller

    This is a very special episode of The Emergence Room. On this episode, we had the pleasure of speaking with Peter N. Miller, President and CEO of the American Academy in Rome, historian, scholar, and longtime advocate for interdisciplinary research and public intellectual life. (aarome.org (https://www.aarome.org/about/staff/peter-n-miller)) For cohost T.J. Dedeaux-Norris, whose current doctoral research focuses on leadership, authenticity, and emergence, this conversation felt especially meaningful. It was a rare opportunity to speak candidly with a leader whose path through academia was far from linear and whose career reflects a deep commitment to curiosity, experimentation, and intellectual generosity. Peter reflected on the years after completing his PhD, when finding stable academic employment proved difficult, in part because his interests moved across disciplines and categories in ways that did not always fit neatly within traditional academic structures. What once may have appeared to be a limitation eventually became one of his greatest strengths: the ability to think expansively, connect ideas across fields, and lead institutions through complexity rather than rigidity. Throughout the conversation, we discussed leadership not as authority or performance, but as a practice of listening, risk-taking, adaptability, and sustained learning. Peter spoke thoughtfully about the importance of research, the pleasure of intellectual discovery, and the reality that meaningful leadership often requires pushing boundaries, questioning systems, and occasionally embracing the role of the rebel inside institutions. There was something especially inspiring about hearing a scholar speak openly about uncertainty, persistence, and the long arc of building a life in the humanities. This episode became a conversation about leadership, interdisciplinarity, curiosity, institutional life, and what it means to remain open to transformation over time. A thoughtful, generous, and deeply energizing conversation from the heart of the American Academy in Rome.

    Peter N. Miller

  8. May 21

    Tameka Baba

    On this episode of The Emergence Room, we are joined by Tameka Baba, a landscape architect, artist, curator, and Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. Tameka is also a Professional Practice Assistant Professor in Landscape Architecture at the Knowlton School at Ohio State University, where her work explores public space, ecology, community, and the transformation of overlooked urban landscapes.   In this conversation, we talk about representing the Midwest, teaching, growth, and the ongoing process of becoming. We reflect on how place shapes identity and creative practice, and how Tameka's work has continued to expand across disciplines during her time in Rome. It's been incredible to witness her evolution from landscape architecture into a broader artistic and curatorial practice, embracing weaving, installation, research, and community-centered approaches to public space. Her work moves fluidly between design, art, and cultural storytelling, opening new ways of thinking about landscape as both social and imaginative space.   This episode is a conversation about transformation, creative expansion, and what it means to keep growing into new forms of practice and possibility.

    Tameka Baba
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About

Hosted by TJ Dedeaux-Norris & Jason Šimánek. Conversations on art, care, creativity, and what it means to emerge.

Information

  • Creator
    T.J. Dedeaux-Norris
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    29
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2025
  • Show Website
    The Emergence Room