T.J. Dedeaux-Norris is a conceptual artist and scholar whose work spans painting, fiber, performance, video, and music, investigating the somatic impacts of racial, gender, and class socialization. Their practice poses a philosophical inquiry into the distinction between Self and Other, treating the body as a social microcosm where identities remain porous, discursive, and fractal. Across form and content, everything is understood as permeable.
Dedeaux-Norris received their BA from University of California, Los Angeles and their MFA from Yale University. Their work has been presented internationally at institutions including the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Nasher Museum of Art, Performa, Prospect New Orleans, Rotterdam Film Festival, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Sundance Film Festival, and The Walker Art Center. They have participated in residencies at MacDowell, Skowhegan, Yaddo, and the Grant Wood Art Colony. Honors include a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, an Iowa Artist Fellowship, and a 2025–2026 Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. They are a tenured Associate Professor at the University of Iowa.
Dedeaux-Norris is currently a doctoral candidate in Education with a concentration in Transformational Leadership and Coaching at Maharishi International University, in the College of Business and Entrepreneurship. Their embodied practice extends beyond the studio into a life-wide investigation of how individual and collective identities manifest through bodily labor over time. Integrating physical, mental, and spiritual modalities—ranging from boxing and chiropractic work to cognitive behavioral therapy—healing becomes a medium through which they reconcile inherited histories and lived contradictions. Grounded in a Black feminist framework, their work resists dichotomy, challenges assumptions of passivity, and insists on time, agency, and the generative power of difference.
How has your time at the Academy shaped or shifted your relationship with authenticity and the direction of your project so far?
I never expected that if I were ever fortunate enough to be at the American Academy in Rome, I would arrive here not only as a working, exhibiting visual artist, but also while actively enrolled in a doctoral program in Transformational Leadership and Coaching at Maharishi International University. That convergence has profoundly reshaped my relationship with authenticity—both personally and professionally.
When I arrived, my proposal centered on a multimedia and experimental memoir. What has shifted is the depth and care with which I’m now able to write through lived experience. My dissertation is taking shape through an autoethnographic lens, allowing me to slow down and examine how authenticity is embodied, practiced, and sustained within creative life, leadership, and systems shaped by stress and productivity.
The first few months here, I truly hit the ground running. There’s a printing press in my studio, and I felt immediately drawn to it—I used it daily for nearly three months. That repetition became a way of thinking through labor, discipline, and presence. More recently, my focus has shifted toward writing and embodied research. I write parts of my dissertation while walking on a treadmill in my studio, alongside constant movement through Rome—walking, exercising, meditating. This rhythm has helped me rethink the structure of my practice as a whole and imagine a future rooted in alignment rather than acceleration.
What part of your daily routine or environment at the Academy has most influenced you and your work?
The shared structure of daily life here has been incredibly grounding. Lunch and dinner happen at the same time every day, and that consistency has made a real difference. Even as a professor, my life at home can be quite variable—busy days, irregular meals, lots of inward focus. Here, the rhythm of shared meals creates a dependable pause.
Those meals have become moments to turn outward—to talk about work, to listen, or simply to enjoy one another’s presence. That sustained communal time has been deeply nourishing. I also keep my studio door open as much as possible. It’s a simple but intentional gesture—an invitation to conversation, curiosity, and connection. That openness mirrors the kind of authentic leadership and creative practice I’m interested in cultivating: relational, attentive, and grounded in presence rather than performance.
Have any encounters—with people, places, or new information—opened up new paths in your research or practice in the past months?
Yes—very much so. I’ve spent a significant amount of time at the Vatican—attending services, visiting the underground crypts, and moving through spaces layered with centuries of devotion, power, ruin, and renewal. Being in a place that has stubbornly sustained itself for so long shifts your sense of time and scale and invites reflection on endurance, belief, and authenticity across history.
At the same time, many of the most generative encounters have been relational and practice-based. During my residency, I launched The Emergence Room, a podcast I co-host with my fellow traveler, Jason Šimánek. The podcast has been a deeply rewarding extension of my research—conversations with artists, scholars, and thinkers about emergence, transition, embodiment, and creative leadership. Much of this work is informed by the ideas of Alfred Adler and Carl Jung, particularly around growth, individuation, and meaning-making. Often, these conversations begin over shared meals at the Academy and continue later in the studio or on the mic.
What new ideas, methods, or areas of inquiry have you been curious to explore or deepen during your residency?
This residency has also allowed me to more fully integrate my coaching practice into my artistic work. Alongside my dissertation, I’ve been coaching artists and creatives internationally, including working with students at American University. Coaching has become an extension of my artistic practice—a way of supporting other artists as they navigate emergence, burnout, transition, and authenticity in their own lives.
In addition to completing my doctorate, I’m working toward certification through the International Coaching Federation. My coaching approach draws from Adlerian concepts of emergence, Jungian reflective methods, and embodied practices, creating space for others to clarify who they are becoming and how they want to live and work.
Overall, this time has given me permission to prioritize alignment—between creative practice, research, leadership, and care. The Academy has offered the rare gift of time and community, allowing me to imagine a life and practice that feel sustainable, intentional, and deeply authentic.