Spotlight: Von Diaz & Cuisines of Resilience

Food Culture & Identity

In Community with Food & Ensemble are honored to be collaborating with Von Diaz, a foundational participant in our inaugural year and 2023 co-host! Von brings her unique understanding at the intersection of Food, Culture & Identity to our Engage programming.

Von Diaz is an Emmy Award-winning documentarian, food historian, and author of Coconuts & Collards: Recipes and Stories from Puerto Rico to the Deep South. 

Born in Puerto Rico and raised in Atlanta, GA, she explores food, culture, and identity. In addition to her debut culinary memoir, she has contributed recipes and essays to a number of cookbooks and anthologies, including America The Great Cookbook (Weldon Owen, 2017), Feed the Resistance (Chronicle Books, 2017), Women on Food (Abrams Book, October 2019), Tasty Pride (Penguin Random House, Fall 2019),  Rage Baking (Simon & Schuster, February 2020), and Sheetpan Chicken (Penguin Random House, September 2020). Her forthcoming book, ISLAS: Cuisines of Resilience (Chronicle, 2023) explores the cuisines of islands across the globe, and the ways they are connected through their use of ancestral cooking techniques. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, The Washington Post,  Bon Appétit, NPR, Food & Wine Magazine, Eater, and Epicurious. She has also been a reporter for NPR, StoryCorps, The Splendid Table, WNYC, PRI’s The World, The Southern Foodways Alliance, Colorlines, and Feet in 2 Worlds.

“I began looking closely at food in part because of a deep personal connection that I felt to the flavors of my island, and my relationship with my grandmother, who passed in 2017. This personal journey led me to look closely at food sovereignty in Puerto Rico, which has since expanded to food access, the impacts of foreign policy on food imports and exports on small islands, and the long term health impacts of food systems that are often imposed on low-income communities.”
- Von Diaz

In addition to food journalism, she has also worked for a number of institutions dedicated to storytelling, arts and culture, and social justice.  She is currently a Senior Producer at StoryCorps, where she’s produced audio for animations, radio broadcasts for NPR’s Morning Edition, and contributed dozens of interviews to the organization’s vast oral history archive in the Library of Congress. She has taught food studies and oral history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Previously, she was the Lehman Brady visiting professor at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.  Beforehand, she was the Editor of Feet in 2 Worlds, which brings the work of immigrant and ethnic media journalists from communities across the U.S. to public radio and the web. She was also the Marketing and Communications Manager for El Museo del Barrio, a celebrated Puerto Rican and Latino museum and cultural institution in New York City. In addition to her teaching and journalistic work, she’s led story research and development for an original documentary film series, a series of animated shorts, and podcast for Google. 

“Although my current work is focused on food history and culture I began my career in social justice advocacy, which continues to inform my work. My education background is in women and gender studies, which led me to work with women and children surviving domestic violence, advocating for women to run for public office, and professional development for marginalized youth. These early experiences inspired me to become a journalist, in order to tell the stories of the communities I’d worked with. I began by focusing on LGBTQ communities, particularly homeless youth, racial justice, violence against women, and economic inequity.”

- Von Diaz

She is a frequent public speaker, and in 2015 she gave the TEDx talk, “Every Dish Has a Story: Mapping My Food History,” exploring how cooking and eating reflect our deepest cultural roots. In addition, she’s taught food writing and audio production workshops at New York University and The New School, among others. She currently sits on the Board of Directors for the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, and is a member of the Journalism Committee for the James Beard Foundation.

Von received a B.A. in Women’s Studies from Agnes Scott College. She went on to receive a dual M.A. in Journalism and Latin American and Caribbean Studies from New York University, where she completed a Tinker Field Research Fellowship to record oral histories of elder LGBTQ communities in Havana, Cuba.