The Emergence Room

Welcome to The Emergence Room. In this episode, we sit down with Kevin Martìn, a 2025–26 Rome Prize Fellow in Modern Italian Studies at the American Academy in Rome and a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley. Kevin's research looks at the sociolinguistic history of Italian colonialism in East Africa, asking what language can reveal about power, migration, colonialism, and the voices that have too often been left outside the historical record.

We talked about being first-generation college students, queerness and identity, belonging and legacy, and what it means to take risks while also giving yourself permission to enjoy the life you've worked so hard to create. We talked about travel, self-care, taking a few liberties, flying first class, and Kevin's role on the Academy's party-planning committee.

We also talked about family. Kevin shared what it meant to have his mother and aunt come to Rome and to share this extraordinary chapter of his life with them. That opened up a larger conversation about making our experiences accessible to the people who helped us get there, and about how an opportunity like the Rome Prize can ripple outward beyond the individual who receives it.

It's a sassy, warm conversation about ambition, family, pleasure, queerness, and belonging, and about creating a life expansive enough to bring other people into the experience with you.

In this episode, we sit down with Darcy Tuttle, a 2025–26 Rome Prize Fellow in Ancient Studies at the American Academy in Rome. Darcy's research moves through ancient Roman religion, law, burial, and funerary practice, asking questions about death, community, and who gets to belong, even after death.

Darcy and T.J. were also Shop Talk partners at the Academy, and early in our time in Rome, Darcy took a group of us on a tour of an ancient burial site that also happened to be full of stray cats. It was one of those wonderfully wild early Rome experiences, and an early indication that Darcy was definitely someone we wanted to talk with more.

In this episode, we talked about writing a dissertation while living at the Academy, loving your research, getting the work done, and also trying to find some balance and actually live your life while you're doing it. We talked about the privilege of being an academic, the strange and fascinating stories that emerge from studying burial and belonging, and what it means to genuinely care about the questions you've chosen to spend years pursuing.

We also talked about teaching and what Darcy calls bringing "big cringe energy" into the classroom: being authentic about her enthusiasm for the work and wanting to transmit some of that energy, curiosity, and excitement to the people she teaches.

It's a conversation about scholarship, teaching, balance, and being unapologetically excited by the work you get to do, while remembering that there is also a whole life happening around it.

In this episode, we sit down with visual artist, photographer, filmmaker, and educator Liana Miuccio. Born in Rome and raised in New York, Liana is a dual citizen of Italy and the United States whose life and practice have moved between these two places. She teaches photography in Rome at Cornell University and Temple University, and her work explores identity, memory, migration, and the ways our everyday lives become part of the stories we tell about ourselves and one another.

This conversation went somewhere deep.

We talked about photography and teaching, about the joy of sharing what you love with students, and about continuing to make a life as an artist in a complicated contemporary art world. We talked about moving between Rome and the United States, following a creative practice across different chapters of a life, and figuring out what it means to live authentically when there may not be one prescribed version of what that life is supposed to look like.

And we talked about anger. We talked about the political climate, relationships, parenting, family, and some of the difficult choices that come with trying to live without regret. The conversation became intimate, vulnerable, funny, and at moments beautifully intense as we considered what it means to listen to yourself and actually do the things you believe you need to do.

Liana's photographs can be beautiful, abstract, and deeply attentive to the everyday, and there is something of that same attentiveness in this conversation. We talked about making art, making choices, loving teaching, navigating change, and trying to build a life that feels like your own.

This is a conversation about what happens when art and life stop being separate questions, and we give ourselves permission to ask: What do I actually want my life to be?

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.

Heather's sculptural practice often takes the form of rooftops and architectural structures that become spaces for gathering, interaction, storytelling, and exchange. Her work asks us to think about who creates space, who belongs within it, and how architecture can become a site for community, memory, and connection.

We talk about teaching and creative practice, self-care and making time for others, and the ongoing work of creating an authentic life as an artist. We also reflect on community, presence, generosity, and what it means to build spaces, both literally and metaphorically, where other people can enter and participate.

It was such a pleasure to share space with Heather in Rome and to come together for this conversation about what we've built, what we carry with us, and what comes next.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.