The Emergence Room

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.

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.

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.

In our conversation, we talk about family, diaspora, storytelling, and the mindset of the composer: how sound can hold memory, grief, intimacy, and cultural inheritance all at once. We reflect on the relationship between music and narrative, and the ways Oswald's compositions navigate Vietnamese aesthetics and tradition through layered textures, timbre, and deeply evocative sonic worlds.

We also discuss his evolving work in Rome, where he has been experimenting with reclaimed materials, hybrid instruments, and questions of environmental change, ruins, and transformation. His practice feels deeply rooted in listening: to history, to silence, to displacement, and to the echoes that shape who we become.

This episode is a conversation about memory, composition, inheritance, and the emotional architecture of sound.

In this episode of The Emergence Room, I'm in conversation with Kendra-Nicole Stephens, a chef, mentor, and community-builder whose work lives at the intersection of craft, care, and purpose.

Kendra joined us at the American Academy in Rome as a friend of the Academy, and what unfolded was more than a visit—it was an exchange rooted in generosity, curiosity, and deep presence. A graduate of Howard University and the Julia Child Culinary Program, and the former Executive Pastry Chef at the Kennedy Center, Kendra brings both technical excellence and expansive vision to everything she touches. Her work spans from leading high-level culinary programs to supporting community-based initiatives like the Anacostia Culinary Center Project, serving as a Cohort Advisor with the James Beard Foundation, and now contributing to the mission of Christ House.

Our conversation moves between the personal and the collective. We reflect on the shift from striving toward something external to discovering a sense of purpose that feels internally aligned. We talk about food as both craft and care—what it means to make a Southern biscuit with intention, and how farming, sustainability, and access shape the future of how we nourish one another. We also explore what it means to find the right environments and communities for one's work and spirit to thrive.

There's warmth in this conversation, but also clarity. Kendra speaks with a grounded sense of knowing—one that comes from experience, reflection, and a deep commitment to people.

This episode is an invitation to consider where purpose lives in your own life, and how it might already be calling you into alignment.

In this episode of The Emergence Room, T.J. Dedeaux-Norris hosts a conversation with Kaaj Tshikalandand – cultural mediator and anthropological researcher. Recorded at the closing of T.J.'s exhibition Black Body: Ancient City at Murate Arts District in Florence, Italy. This marks the podcast's first-ever live episode, held in the museum with a live audience, and the first time T.J. is hosting the show on her own within the space of her own exhibition.

As the exhibition comes to a close, the conversation unfolds in a space held by the work, the architecture, and the gathered audience. It reflects a shift in T.J.'s ongoing dissertation, where the work expands through dialogue, through people, and through presence.

Together, they move through questions of intuition and becoming—what it means to be an oracle, to conjure, and to trust one's inner knowing. The conversation explores accepting one's gifts and living in alignment with them, while also reflecting on the importance of community—how it is built, sustained, and returned to. They speak to happiness as a practice, to care as a necessity, and to the ongoing work of refilling one's social and energetic capacity. Throughout, themes of authenticity, congruence, and integration emerge as lived processes rather than fixed states.

The conversation holds a sense of resonance that lingers—an exchange that feels both grounding and expansive.

This episode marks an opening in the work itself, where it continues to unfold not only in the studio, but in relationship, in voice, and in shared space.

In this episode of The Emergence Room, we sit down with Liz Glynn – a sculptor, performance artist, and current Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. Known for her work navigating endurance, material transformation, and the politics of labor, Glynn has been in Rome working with wax and plaster – materials that hold memory, pressure, and impermanence, echoing her ongoing interest in how bodies, histories, and systems leave their imprint.

Together, we move through a layered conversation on teaching, motherhood, and research, tracing how these roles intersect and sometimes collide within contemporary academic life. We reflect on what equity might actually require of institutions, and where accountability begins – and too often dissolves. What does it mean to sustain a practice – intellectually, creatively, physically – inside structures that are not always designed for care?

Glynn, who teaches at University of California, Irvine, brings a grounded and generous perspective on navigating these tensions, offering insight into how wellness is not separate from the work, but deeply entangled within it. This episode holds space for the ongoing negotiation between making, teaching, caregiving, and becoming – and the quiet, radical insistence on doing so with integrity.

On this episode of The Emergence Room, we are joined by Aliza Wong, Director of the American Academy in Rome and a professor of history at Texas Tech University, where she has spent over two decades teaching and mentoring students. Her scholarship centers on modern Italy and the Mediterranean, with a focus on race, nation, culture, and identity—work that feels deeply connected to the kinds of conversations she fosters in the spaces she leads.

At the Academy, Aliza leads with a rare combination of humility, humor, warmth—and yes, an unmistakable sense of style. She is someone who makes an institution feel human, who holds space for both rigor and care, and who, especially in this moment, has helped shape the Academy into a place that feels like home.

Our conversation moves through first-generation experience, body image, family, and the complexities of leadership. What unfolds is something tender and honest—a portrait of a leader who listens, adapts, and leads with both strength and vulnerability.

Aliza embodies a way of leading that feels expansive and relational, and reflects the kind of leadership we, as co-hosts, are continuing to grow into ourselves.

In this episode of The Emergence Room, we sit with João Salema, a fellow traveler whose practice feels as fluid and transient as the way she moves through the world.

Our conversation unfolds around living between places—between homes, cities, languages, and selves. We talk about what it means to build an art practice while constantly in motion, and how João makes objects appear, disappear, and reappear—both materially and emotionally. We return again and again to the idea of home: what it is, where it lives in the body, and how New York shaped her understanding of belonging, distance, and desire.

João is someone who holds contradiction beautifully. She can be quiet and observant, then suddenly strong and decisive. She's generous in spirit, sharp in humor, and deeply attuned to sensibility and style. We talk about beauty—beauty in the work, beauty in the world, and the courage it takes to choose beauty as a serious artistic value.

She is, without question, one of the most stylish and aesthetically generous presences at the Academy. João has transformed her living space into an extension of her practice—decorating it with her own artwork and opening her bedroom studio to others. That gesture says everything about her work: intimate and personal, yet deliberately private; inviting, but held with care.

This episode is about movement, making, and the quiet power of creating worlds wherever you land.

In this episode, we are joined by Christine Sun Kim, an artist whose work rigorously examines sound, language, power, and access. Christine's practice challenges assumed hierarchies of communication and invites us to reconsider how meaning is produced, circulated, and authorized. Her work moves across drawing, installation, performance, and social engagement, often asking who systems are built for and who is required to adapt.

On this episode of The Emergence Room, we're so honored to sit down with Sean Mooney — American Academy in Rome Fellow, artist, curator, and longtime collaborator with Chuna McIntyre.

This conversation unfolds around music and singing, and how sound becomes a way of holding memory, devotion, and care. We talk about what it means to live as an artist who is also a caretaker — of ideas, of objects, of people, and of shared histories.

We reflect together on houses: the homes our families once lived in, the places we grew up in, and the meaning of returning to them. Jason and I share about recently buying a family home, and Sean talks about renovating his — not just as a practical act, but as a form of curating memory, tending to the past, and making space for what comes next.

We talk about collaboration, about caring for objects and stories, about legacy — not as something abstract or distant, but as something shaped through daily attention, responsibility, and love. It's a conversation about keeping our house in order, in every sense of the phrase, and about how emergence often looks like showing up for one another with patience and care.

We're deeply grateful for Sean's generosity, openness, and presence in this conversation. This one will stay with you long after it ends.