Hosted by TJ Dedeaux-Norris & Jason Šimánek. Conversations on art, care, creativity, and what it means to emerge.
On this episode of The Emergence Room, Heather Hart joins us for a conversation about culminating our time as 2025–26 Rome Prize Fellows at the American Academy in Rome and what it means to carry that experience forward. Heather is an artist, Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Rutgers University, and co-founder of Black Lunch Table, a platform dedicated to supporting the histories, intellectual agency, and communities of Black artists.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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New episode of The Emergence Room featuring Katharine Ogle, poet, scholar, mother, educator, and 2026 Rome Prize Fellow in Environmental Arts & Humanities at the American Academy in Rome. Katharine’s collaborative project with biologist Adam Summers, Piscis Romana, reimagines the field guide, the poem, and the scientific archive all at once: part bestiary, part walking guide, part ecological meditation.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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On this episode of The Emerence Room, we are joined by Oswald Huỳnh, a Vietnamese American composer from Portland, Oregon, and a fellow at the American Academy in Rome. Recently named a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow, Oswald’s work moves through questions of memory, heritage, language, identity, and the emotional textures carried across generations.
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