The Collectors: Adrian Danchig-Waring & Thomas Rom
The couple has created what they call a “psychedelic queer fantasia” inside their home that includes a menagerie of Haas Brothers tableware
Adrian Danchig-Waring, an outgoing principal dancer of the New York City Ballet and artistic director of its Choreographic Institute, and his partner, Thomas Rom, an art adviser and board chair of Performance Space New York, have created what they call a “psychedelic queer fantasia” inside their 1,100-square-foot home, a former 1890s barn in bucolic Rensselaerville, New York.
Their collecting traces back in part to Danchig-Waring’s decades of touring, when performances in far-flung places led him to return with Scandinavian lamps, Southeast Asian craft objects, and other memorabilia. The house now expresses their life together with similar exuberance. A monumental Amir H. Fallah tondo sits flush with the screening room’s ceiling. They own a menagerie of Haas Brothers tableware and works by Krzysztof Strzelecki, Genevieve Gaignard, and Yinka Shonibare, which populate cozy rooms dense with thoughtful surprises.
Open mind: Roughly 140 works fill the residence, many reflecting the couple’s encyclopedic understanding of queerness as a method of “challenging assumed ways of being,” Danchig-Waring explains. “Queerness for us isn’t specifically our sexuality or that facet of being, but more about questioning structures and systems that we inherit and making conscious choices about alternatives.”
A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2026 Late Fall Issue in the section “The Collectors.” Subscribe to the magazine.