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.