Hello! I'm Jenny. I'm a professional chef, food writer, speaker, and social entrepreneur based in Los Angeles. 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 that birthed the first iteration of 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 to connect with the world around them and 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 (āh-tào, stands for all together at once) is an award-winning, 501(c)3 nonprofit defining more equitable standards for the food, beverage, and hospitality industry through community-informed research, education, and programming.

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You can learn more about Studio ATAO at www.studioatao.org. If you have benefitted from our infrastructure-building and training work, please consider supporting us by via Patreon (monthly patrons) or GiveLively (one-time donation). If you're interested in learning alongside us, make sure to sign up for our newsletters full of original content and opportunities to get engaged within the food, beverage, and hospitality community.