photo by Hannah Burton for Bustle

about

Hello! I'm Jenny. I'm a professional chef, food writer, speaker and social entrepreneur based between Los Angeles and NYC. I use food to express the full range of human emotions and social commentary about the world around us. I believe food has a special way of exposing the banal routine and social norms we find ourselves in. It can be a powerful medium for storytelling and create a place for genuine interaction -- if we choose to use it as such.

My mission is to use culinary arts as a platform to evoke introspection, empathy and real emotion. Sometimes my food or the environments I create make people uncomfortable, and that's the point. I don't plan on being complicit with the way things are; I want to change the world with my art, even if it's just one honest conversation at a time.

Before I started my journey in food, I was addicted to social acceptance (I still am, just less so). I started my career as a very (literally) hungry management consultant in the fashion industry before moving on to become the youngest MBA candidate at Columbia Business School. Shockingly, resume accolades do not make us truly happy and I found myself depressed and lost. I decided to take a sabbatical and go "find myself" -- which led me to culinary school, various fancy-schmancy starred restaurants and a bizarre set of jobs (ironic highlight: selling cold-pressed juice door-to-door to Silicon Valley VC firms). Through these twists and turns, I parlayed my abilities into a culinary consulting business, which I feel lucky to say has been successful and rewarding while forcing me to grow up and be a professional.

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But I wanted more. At the beginning of 2017, I had an epiphany (at acupuncture) that I should use augmented & virtual reality to make my work more impactful. My experiments with these emerging technologies in the 'immersive' world has helped me narrow in on which social issues I'm particularly passionate about, and with that has birthed Studio ATAO. The Studio is my nonprofit baby that keeps me up at night as I rack my brain of ways to keep pushing people's boundaries with food & art and make them feel something. Where does this road lead? I'm still not sure. It's been a hell of a ride so far, but there's no saying what excitements and failures it still has in store. What I do know, however, is that I'll never wake up and wonder "what if?".

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And yes, that's a photo of me being doused in honey mustard, because life is about living and the internet is forever.

My company Studio ATAO (pronounced a-tao, stands for all together at once) is a 501(c)3 nonprofit community think tank that creates content & experiences at the intersection of food, art and social impact. We're a scrappy, nimble org with 2 main branches: public programming & community initiatives.

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Public Programming: We concept, build, execute and tour our own proprietary culinary-based public programming experiences across the United States. Our flagship series, Asian in America is an award-nominated experience fusing food & drink, virtual reality & poetry examining the trials & tribulations of the Asian American identity and has been on tour since 2018. Our series HIDDEN, a multi-sensory food, art and dance journey, debuted in 2019. We are also in pre-production for our newest series, Glass Through Skin, a therapeutic exhibition & dining experience exploring the invisibility and normalization of female pain on the axes of the body, pleasure and beauty.

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Community Initiatives: We gather industry professionals together for small-group dinner-and-discussions we call Experimental Salons, where we tackle a social impact topic pertinent to their work. We then use these conversations to create ​toolkits and resource documents for the general public to use. Most recently, we worked with food media professionals to create a toolkit on recognizing, disrupting, and preventing tokenization as well as the Asian Americans community to develop a toolkit on unlearning scarcity and cultivating solidarity.

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You can learn more about Studio ATAO's mission, vision for the future and work at our official site www.studioatao.org. If you love what we do, please consider supporting us by via Patreon (monthly patrons) or GiveLively (one-time donation). If you're also a thoughtful, mission-driven individual, come join our digital FB community Social Impact Professionals where we discuss current news and cross-pollinate learnings across industries to grow and become better humans.