photo credit: Enrico Cerrretti
Research
Recent career
Major projects (selected)
The Emergence Room Podcast
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Estate of Tameka Jenean Norris, Transform Any Room, Des Moines Art Center
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Legacy as Wikipedia Page, Tameka Norris
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Still (a) Life, video
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Embodied Research, Iowa Arts Council Award
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a eulogy: By(e), Tameka!, video
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Solo exhibitions (selected)
Black Body, Ancient City, Murate Art District, Florence, Italy
Breach of Confidentiality, Walter Maciel Gallery
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Talk Back, Chapter One: Estate, Charles Allis Museum
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Grief Portraits, Dora Maar Residency, Menerbes, France
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Second Line, Illinois State University
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The Estate of Tameka Jenean
Norris, Figge Museum
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Laissez les Bon Temps Rouler, Galerie PJ, Metz, France
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Group Exhibitions (selected)
30X30, Jane Lombard Gallery, NY
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Made in the Plains, Joslyn Museum of Art, Omaha, NE
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Expo Chicago, Jane Lombard Gallery
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Transform Any Room, curated by Laura Burkhalter, Des Moines Art Center
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Echoes of Paradise, Jane Lombard Gallery
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Dirty South @ Virginia Museum of Fine Art, curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver
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Queer Threads, curated by John Chaich, San Jose Museum of Textiles and Quilts.
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On the road: chocolate cities @ TONE, curated by Larry Ossei-Mensah
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Gay Guerilla,
curated by Arcade Project Curatorial
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Recent press
American Academy in Rome, Martyrs, Vessels, and Perpetual Becoming (April 15, 2025)
MIU doctoral student T.J. Dedeaux-Norris wins Prestigious Prize (MIU News, October 25, 2025)
Dedeaux-Norris Wins Prestigious Rome Prize (Daily Iowan, May 6, 2025)
T.J. Dedeaux-Norris at Walter Maciel Gallery, Artillery Magazine, January 17, 2025
T.J. Dedeaux Norris: A Journey Through Art and Identity, Sixty Inches From Center, (November 21, 2024)
T.J. Dedeaux-Norris's Medium is Healing (Hyperallergic, June 27, 2023)
'Blackness is many things': Meka Jean breaks down 'partitions of Identity' in Visual LP, Little Village, (March 4, 2021)
Holland Kotter: Art Meets Its Soundtrack in 'Dirty South' (New York Times, July 15, 2021)
How T.J. Dedeaux-Norris turns exploitation on its head (Little Village, August, 2020)
American Academy in Rome, Martyrs, Vessels, and Perpetual Becoming (April 15, 2025)
MIU doctoral student T.J. Dedeaux-Norris wins Prestigious Prize (MIU News, October 25, 2025)
Dedeaux-Norris Wins Prestigious Rome Prize (Daily Iowan, May 6, 2025)
T.J. Dedeaux-Norris at Walter Maciel Gallery, Artillery Magazine, January 17, 2025
T.J. Dedeaux Norris: A Journey Through Art and Identity, Sixty Inches From Center, (November 21, 2024)
T.J. Dedeaux-Norris's Medium is Healing (Hyperallergic, June 27, 2023)
'Blackness is many things': Meka Jean breaks down 'partitions of Identity' in Visual LP, Little Village, (March 4, 2021)
Holland Kotter: Art Meets Its Soundtrack in 'Dirty South' (New York Times, July 15, 2021)
How T.J. Dedeaux-Norris turns exploitation on its head (Little Village, August, 2020)
research statement
I am currently a doctoral candidate pursuing a Doctorate in Education in Transformational Leadership & Coaching in the College of Business and Entrepreneurship, at Maharishi International University, where my dissertation focuses on the self-efficacy, wellness, and creative capacity of artists—particularly women of color working within the intertwined systems of art and academia. My research asks whether focused coaching, emergent growth frameworks, and trauma-informed creative methodologies can directly improve the artistic confidence, productivity, and emotional wellbeing of artists across career stages. This direction represents the culmination of years spent teaching, leading, and mentoring, and it marks a defining shift in my practice toward building sustainable, future-facing models of curriculum, leadership, and artist development. I am also the 2025–2026 American Academy in Rome Prize Fellow in Visual Arts, an honor that represents a major moment of emergence and transformation within my personal, scholarly, and artistic life.
I received my MFA in Painting & Printmaking from Yale University and my BA in Art from the University of California, Los Angeles, building the foundation for a hybrid practice that bridges rigorous studio art training with critical studies in performance, identity, and African American cultural histories. From the beginning of my career, my practice has been propelled by lived experience and the need to reconcile the multiple selves, personas, and bodies I have inhabited as a BIPOC, queer, woman-bodied person navigating the United States. My work has evolved not only as an artistic investigation but as a lifelong, devotional practice of healing. Over time, this practice produced several distinct personas—Tameka Jenean Norris, Meka Jean, and T.J. Dedeaux-Norris—each emerging in response to different life conditions and creative necessities, each offering tools that I continue to carry into my roles as artist, educator, and leader.
My earliest work under the persona of Tameka Jenean Norris was deeply shaped by Hurricane Katrina. Growing up on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and spending summers in New Orleans, I witnessed firsthand the emotional, infrastructural, and financial devastation the storm inflicted on under-resourced Black communities, including my own family. These formative experiences generated work that centered themes of access, trauma, mental and physical health, domesticity, family support systems, and the fragile structure of communal life in the South. My makeshift textile paintings depicting deteriorating homes and intimate domestic scenes were recognized in multiple Prospect New Orleans Biennials (2011, 2012, 2014), establishing a foundational connection between my practice and the American South—a relationship that continues to inform my work today.
As my practice expanded, I developed the persona of Meka Jean, a rap-informed, performance-driven figure born from my years living in Los Angeles. Through this persona, my work moved into performance, video, and film, using the language of rap, spectacle, and braggadocio to interrogate celebrity culture, media representation, sexuality, and identity construction. This body of work embraced the artifice of performance to reveal the psychological and cultural pressures surrounding Black femme bodies in entertainment and the fine arts. During this period, works such as those included in the national traveling exhibition Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art established my role as both participant in and scholar of Black performance lineages.
Parallel to these developments, my position as a third-generation artist in the lineage of Institutional Critique, trained by its founders, sharpened my focus on the academic spaces I traversed. Entering institutions at politically fraught moments—such as beginning my training just after Affirmative Action protections had been overturned—my performance and video documentation critically examined systems of authority, gendered and racialized hierarchies, and questions of belonging. Works such as Yale School of Art: Semesters 1–4 (2010–12), prominently discussed in Portraying Unease: The Art and Politics of Uncomfortable Attachments (Suneson, 2022), and Untitled (2012), exhibited in Radical Presence, helped articulate the emotional and institutional frictions that would later become the core of my teaching, leadership, and scholarly research.
My national and international exhibitions further developed this sensibility. Solo exhibitions at Ronchini Gallery (2014, 2017), the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans (2013), and the Savannah College of Art and Design (2015), alongside group exhibitions including Dirty South (2021–22), Southern Accent (2016–17), the San Jose Museum of Art (2023), the Hirshhorn Museum (2018), the Krannert Art Museum (2017), and others, contributed to the visibility of my work and its ongoing dialogue with Black Southern identity, institutional life, and the politics of representation. My work is held in institutional collections including the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Peggy Cooper Cafritz Collection, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Figge Art Museum, and in the private collection of Valerie Cassel Oliver, Wangechi Mutu, Dawoud Bey, William Villalongo, and Peter Williams.
A major shift occurred when, after experiencing the loss of my grandmother and becoming the primary caregiver for my ailing mother, I recognized that the personas of Tameka and Meka were no longer emotionally or physically sustainable frameworks through which to continue working. In 2019, I legally abbreviated my name to T.J. Dedeaux-Norris, honoring my French-Creole heritage and releasing myself from the racialized and gendered expectations attached to my birth name. This transition gave rise to two transformative long-term projects: The Estate of Tameka Jenean Norris and #embodiedresearch.
The Estate of Tameka Jenean Norris marks a conceptual “death” of my former self, beginning with Coffin (2020), a rose gold coffin installed at gallery entrances, and A Eulogy, By(e) Tameka! (2021), a single-channel performance video reciting the eulogy of my past identity. These works, exhibited at the Figge Art Museum (2020), University Galleries at Illinois State University (2021), the Charles Allis Museum (2023), and the Des Moines Art Center (2023), present the remnants of my earlier personas—paintings, heirlooms, personal objects—as the archived estate of an artist who has passed on. Awards including a Pollock-Krasner Grant (2019), NEA Fellowships (2016, 2018), and an Iowa Arts Council Fellowship (2022), alongside residencies such as MASS MoCA (2024), Dora Maar Residency (2023), Yaddo (2019), Vermont Studio Center (2018), MacDowell (2016), Fountainhead (2009), and Skowhegan (2009), have supported this work.
Simultaneously, #embodiedresearch emerged as a project rejecting reliance on the art market and instead centering the artist’s body as the primary investment. Through running, boxing, detoxing, meditation, therapy, and other endurance-based practices, this project examines how the physical body itself becomes both a medium and a site of healing. These embodied methods now directly inform the coaching structures I am formalizing in my doctoral research, especially in relation to supporting artists and academics experiencing burnout, institutional trauma, precarity, and the psychological strain of creative labor.
Alongside my artistic and scholarly work, I currently serve as an Associate Professor of Painting & Drawing at the University of Iowa, where I also hold an appointment in African American Studies. As Area Head (2023–25), I oversaw curriculum restructuring, BFA/MFA program development, and contemporary art pedagogy across the division. My previous academic appointments at Santa Monica College, Dillard University, and Xavier University further shaped my commitment to student mentorship, interdisciplinary teaching, and equity within art education. These experiences, together with my EdD doctoral training, are guiding me toward future leadership roles where I can help shape sustainable, innovative frameworks for art instruction, mentorship, and professional preparation in a rapidly shifting art world and educational system.
Across all of these contexts—studio practice, teaching, coaching, and scholarship—my life’s work has been to cultivate environments where artists can thrive, to interrogate the structures that impact their development, and to build models for learning and creativity that are responsive to changing social, economic, and institutional conditions. Everything I have lived, studied, created, and transformed has led me to this moment: a moment grounded in emergence, guided by leadership, and dedicated to supporting the next generation of artists and scholars with compassion, rigor, and imagination.
I received my MFA in Painting & Printmaking from Yale University and my BA in Art from the University of California, Los Angeles, building the foundation for a hybrid practice that bridges rigorous studio art training with critical studies in performance, identity, and African American cultural histories. From the beginning of my career, my practice has been propelled by lived experience and the need to reconcile the multiple selves, personas, and bodies I have inhabited as a BIPOC, queer, woman-bodied person navigating the United States. My work has evolved not only as an artistic investigation but as a lifelong, devotional practice of healing. Over time, this practice produced several distinct personas—Tameka Jenean Norris, Meka Jean, and T.J. Dedeaux-Norris—each emerging in response to different life conditions and creative necessities, each offering tools that I continue to carry into my roles as artist, educator, and leader.
My earliest work under the persona of Tameka Jenean Norris was deeply shaped by Hurricane Katrina. Growing up on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and spending summers in New Orleans, I witnessed firsthand the emotional, infrastructural, and financial devastation the storm inflicted on under-resourced Black communities, including my own family. These formative experiences generated work that centered themes of access, trauma, mental and physical health, domesticity, family support systems, and the fragile structure of communal life in the South. My makeshift textile paintings depicting deteriorating homes and intimate domestic scenes were recognized in multiple Prospect New Orleans Biennials (2011, 2012, 2014), establishing a foundational connection between my practice and the American South—a relationship that continues to inform my work today.
As my practice expanded, I developed the persona of Meka Jean, a rap-informed, performance-driven figure born from my years living in Los Angeles. Through this persona, my work moved into performance, video, and film, using the language of rap, spectacle, and braggadocio to interrogate celebrity culture, media representation, sexuality, and identity construction. This body of work embraced the artifice of performance to reveal the psychological and cultural pressures surrounding Black femme bodies in entertainment and the fine arts. During this period, works such as those included in the national traveling exhibition Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art established my role as both participant in and scholar of Black performance lineages.
Parallel to these developments, my position as a third-generation artist in the lineage of Institutional Critique, trained by its founders, sharpened my focus on the academic spaces I traversed. Entering institutions at politically fraught moments—such as beginning my training just after Affirmative Action protections had been overturned—my performance and video documentation critically examined systems of authority, gendered and racialized hierarchies, and questions of belonging. Works such as Yale School of Art: Semesters 1–4 (2010–12), prominently discussed in Portraying Unease: The Art and Politics of Uncomfortable Attachments (Suneson, 2022), and Untitled (2012), exhibited in Radical Presence, helped articulate the emotional and institutional frictions that would later become the core of my teaching, leadership, and scholarly research.
My national and international exhibitions further developed this sensibility. Solo exhibitions at Ronchini Gallery (2014, 2017), the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans (2013), and the Savannah College of Art and Design (2015), alongside group exhibitions including Dirty South (2021–22), Southern Accent (2016–17), the San Jose Museum of Art (2023), the Hirshhorn Museum (2018), the Krannert Art Museum (2017), and others, contributed to the visibility of my work and its ongoing dialogue with Black Southern identity, institutional life, and the politics of representation. My work is held in institutional collections including the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Peggy Cooper Cafritz Collection, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Figge Art Museum, and in the private collection of Valerie Cassel Oliver, Wangechi Mutu, Dawoud Bey, William Villalongo, and Peter Williams.
A major shift occurred when, after experiencing the loss of my grandmother and becoming the primary caregiver for my ailing mother, I recognized that the personas of Tameka and Meka were no longer emotionally or physically sustainable frameworks through which to continue working. In 2019, I legally abbreviated my name to T.J. Dedeaux-Norris, honoring my French-Creole heritage and releasing myself from the racialized and gendered expectations attached to my birth name. This transition gave rise to two transformative long-term projects: The Estate of Tameka Jenean Norris and #embodiedresearch.
The Estate of Tameka Jenean Norris marks a conceptual “death” of my former self, beginning with Coffin (2020), a rose gold coffin installed at gallery entrances, and A Eulogy, By(e) Tameka! (2021), a single-channel performance video reciting the eulogy of my past identity. These works, exhibited at the Figge Art Museum (2020), University Galleries at Illinois State University (2021), the Charles Allis Museum (2023), and the Des Moines Art Center (2023), present the remnants of my earlier personas—paintings, heirlooms, personal objects—as the archived estate of an artist who has passed on. Awards including a Pollock-Krasner Grant (2019), NEA Fellowships (2016, 2018), and an Iowa Arts Council Fellowship (2022), alongside residencies such as MASS MoCA (2024), Dora Maar Residency (2023), Yaddo (2019), Vermont Studio Center (2018), MacDowell (2016), Fountainhead (2009), and Skowhegan (2009), have supported this work.
Simultaneously, #embodiedresearch emerged as a project rejecting reliance on the art market and instead centering the artist’s body as the primary investment. Through running, boxing, detoxing, meditation, therapy, and other endurance-based practices, this project examines how the physical body itself becomes both a medium and a site of healing. These embodied methods now directly inform the coaching structures I am formalizing in my doctoral research, especially in relation to supporting artists and academics experiencing burnout, institutional trauma, precarity, and the psychological strain of creative labor.
Alongside my artistic and scholarly work, I currently serve as an Associate Professor of Painting & Drawing at the University of Iowa, where I also hold an appointment in African American Studies. As Area Head (2023–25), I oversaw curriculum restructuring, BFA/MFA program development, and contemporary art pedagogy across the division. My previous academic appointments at Santa Monica College, Dillard University, and Xavier University further shaped my commitment to student mentorship, interdisciplinary teaching, and equity within art education. These experiences, together with my EdD doctoral training, are guiding me toward future leadership roles where I can help shape sustainable, innovative frameworks for art instruction, mentorship, and professional preparation in a rapidly shifting art world and educational system.
Across all of these contexts—studio practice, teaching, coaching, and scholarship—my life’s work has been to cultivate environments where artists can thrive, to interrogate the structures that impact their development, and to build models for learning and creativity that are responsive to changing social, economic, and institutional conditions. Everything I have lived, studied, created, and transformed has led me to this moment: a moment grounded in emergence, guided by leadership, and dedicated to supporting the next generation of artists and scholars with compassion, rigor, and imagination.
full portfolio
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