Food Design Course

Dr. Francesca Zampollo is a Design Theory and Food Design researcher, consultant, teacher, and keen public speaker.
She is the author of the Food Design Thinking methodology which she brings to companies, schools, and professionals. Francesca is the founder of the OSFD Online School of Food Design© and the founding editor of the International Journal of Food Design, the first and only academic journal on Food Design, the founder of the International Food Design Society, and she organised the first, second, and third International Conferences on Food Design.
Francesca earned a PhD in Design Theory applied to Food Design in 2014, she taught Food Design and Design Theory at London Metropolitan University and Auckland University of Technology as a full time lecturer and researcher, and now teaches in various universities as a visiting lecturer. Francesca’s current research and work revolves around Design Theory, System Design Thinking, and the role of spirituality in Design.

francescazampollo.com

Amanny Ahmad is a Palestinian-American artist, cook, land worker, and folk herbalist. In her research-based practice, she studies things small & large: whole systems design, food as language, land as life, historical & contemporary relationships between humans & non-humans, botany, mycology, indigenous culinary traditions & plant use, histories of resistance; and how those things can teach us about preservation, survival, and world-making. Her research culminates in a variety of forms: writing, photographs, objects, garden design, fermentation, herbal preparations, and most publicly, large scale meals, often cooked over live fire, incorporating local wild ingredients.

Being in, on, of, and with the land is her main priority & joy.

Douglas McMaster is a British chef renowned for pioneering zero-waste dining. Born near Sheffield, England, he began his culinary journey at Winteringham Fields, a two Michelin-starred restaurant. He further honed his skills at esteemed establishments such as St. John in London, The Fat Duck, and Noma in Copenhagen.

In 2014, McMaster founded Silo in Brighton, recognized as the world's first zero-waste restaurant. Silo emphasizes sustainable practices, including on-site flour milling and composting organic waste. In 2019, he relocated Silo to London, continuing his commitment to sustainable gastronomy.

Throughout his career, McMaster has received numerous accolades, including the 'BBC Young Chef of the Year' award and 'Britain's Most Innovative Chef' by the Young British Foodies. He is also the author of "Silo: The Zero Waste Blueprint," sharing insights into sustainable food systems.

Beyond his restaurant endeavors, McMaster is a prominent advocate for sustainable food practices, sharing his philosophy through public speaking and educational initiatives.

LinYee Yuan is the founder and editor of MOLD, a critically acclaimed magazine exploring the intersection of design and the future of food. In 2022, she launched Field Meridians, an artist collective focused on building tools for ecological resilience through social practice.

Through exhibitions, publishing, and community engagement, Field Meridians works within the Crown Heights community to lay the groundwork for food sovereignty in the heart of Brooklyn.
LinYee is also an adjunct professor at Parsons, The New School. Her career includes roles as editorial director for the Emerson Collective, entrepreneur-in- residence for QZ.com, and editor for Core77, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and Theme Magazine.

Her work is a testament to the power of design in fostering meaningful social and environmental change.

Jocelyn Jackson is an award-winning chef, artist, teacher, and activist who was raised on the Kansas plains by a Tuskegee Airman and the first Black woman to run for Mayor in Wichita. Her family's tradition of social justice led her to pursue a law degree after completing her BA in Fine Arts. After practicing law for six years in DC, she spent two years in Mali, West Africa as a Natural Resource Volunteer before returning to complete her MS in Environmental Education.

In the Bay Area, her lifelong devotion to healing food experiences became the vessel for her cultural entrepreneurship and activism. During her 15-year career as a professional cook, she has founded JUSTUS Kitchen and co-founded People's Kitchen Collective (PKC). Both organizations center the lived experiences and liberation of Black and brown peoples, using food, art, and social justice as vehicles for change. For 12 years, PKC has run a Free Breakfast Program honoring the Black Panther Party legacy at the Life is Living Festival. In 2024, PKC became the festival's executive producer.

Jocelyn's work has earned numerous accolades. She was named Rising Star Chef alongside PKC by the SF Chronicle and currently serves as Chef-in-Residence for the Museum of the African Diaspora in SF. She has received the Rainin Open Spaces and Fellows Grant, Creative Capital Award, Ruth Foundation for the Arts Grant, Headlands Center for the Arts Residency, and Mellon Foundation Grant—all supporting the EARTH SEED: A Journey of Radical Hospitality project and documentary film. In 2021, Ava DuVernay's LEAP Foundation selected her to create a culinary arts installation reflecting the story of Philando Castile.

Jocelyn's writing on food and justice has appeared in Eater, Epicurious, The Kitchn, Feed the Resistance by Julia Turshen, and Black Food by Bryant Terry.

Fernando García-Dory’s (b. 1978) work engages specifically with the relationship between culture and nature now, as manifested in multiple contexts, from landscape and the rural, to desires and expectations concerned with identity, through to (global) crisis, utopia and the potential for social change. He studied Fine Arts and Rural Sociology, and now prepairing his PhD on Agroecology. Interested in the harmonic complexity of biological forms and processes, his work addresses connections and cooperation, from microorganisms to social systems, and from traditional art languages such as drawing to collaborative agro-ecological projects, actions, and cooperatives. Fernando is the founder of “INLAND- CAMPO ADENTRO”, a project that examines the role of territories, geopolitics, culture and identity in the relationship between the city and the countryside in Spain today.

Amy Franceschini is an artist who draws from her training as a photojournalist and having grown up amidst the divergent agricultural projects of her father as an industrial farmer in the San Joaquin Valley of California and her mother who owned and operated a small-scale bio-dynamic farm and was involved in the ongoing struggle to transition conventional farms to organic farms. Amy is interested in the notion of “farming” as a relational practice, involving a complex ecology of the material, social and the immaterial where dailyness and seasonality, orality, ritual, myth and an acute awareness of one’s bioregion organize our collective imaginaries and how we live together.

In 1995, Amy founded Futurefarmers, a collaborative platform to consider the social, political and environmental organization of space. Futurefarmers are artists, architects, computer programmers, farmers, writers and anthropologists who form situated working groups informed by the contexts in which they work. They find themselves entangled in overlapping lines of inquiry in the commons, hi/low tech horizons and a critical view on the tools we create. Based in enmeshed acts of wandering and material processes, Futurefarmers interweave their practices to cultivate public life in place. Through time and the practiced presence of Futurefarmers, the meeting place of people and materials transform from provisional arrangements into durable forms and functions of their works.

Futurefarmers have been the lead artists of Flatbread Society (2010-2018), a permanent public farm and community baking house in Oslo, they have been artist/researchers in residence at the University of California in Santa Cruz (2018-2020) and the lead artists on the sea-faring Seed Journey (2016- 2018+).

Amy received her M.F.A from Stanford University (2002) and her Bachelor in Fine Art in Photography from San Francisco State University (1992). She is the recipient of a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2017 Herb Alpert Award and is currently visiting faculty in the Master of Eco-Social Design at the Free University in Bolzano, Italy.

Collectively, Futurefarmers have published A Variation on Powers of Ten, Sternberg Press, 2012, For Want of a Nail, MIT Press, 2018. Exhibitions include Solomon R. Guggenheim, 2010 (solo), New York Museum of Modern Art 2008, Whitney Museum of American Art, Biennial 2000, Sharjah Biennale 2017 and the Taipei Biennale 2018.

Thiago Gomide Nasser is co-founder and executive director of Junta Local, an organization that supports a community of local producers based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Since 2014 Junta Local has run street markets and held events focusing on the promotion of good, local food. Unti 2023 it ran an online platform through which its community of more that 150 producers can sell directly to consumers. In 2025 Junta Local is set to start operating the "Novo Mercado São José" a fixed market place in Rio de Janeiro. He is also the editor and publisher of Revista Feira, an independent food magazine. He holds a PhD from the Institute of Social and Political Studies from the State University of Rio de Janeiro (IESP-UERJ) where he researched food and politics. His dissertation, titled "Food and Power: The Place of Politics in Gastronomic Discourse" focused on the role of chefs in the shaping of food discourse in Brazil". He is the author of several articles in Portuguese and of the chapter "Tropical Brooklyn" in the book "Global Brooklyn: Designing Food Experiences in World Cities" (Fabio Parasecoli, 2021). As a researcher and activist he is a member of the Organic Production Commission of the State of Rio and is currently championing the creation of a market authority for the city of Rio de Janeiro.