Meet our Kitchen Brigade
What is a kitchen brigade? This structured team system delegates responsibilities to different individuals who specialize in certain tasks in the kitchen. Together, we experiment to explore gastronomic worlds that converged beyond the bounds of colonialism.
Chef de Cuisine
Tao Leigh Goffe, PhD is a London-born, New York-raised Black British writer, theorist, and interdisciplinary artist. Specializing in colonial histories of race, climate, and sound technology, she is also an avid home cook. She gives lectures on food histories at museums and has led corporate cooking demos. From aubergine curry to jerk snapper to vegan Jamaican patties, her recipes have been published in various collections and cookbooks. Prof. Goffe documents her cooking experimentation on ‘Gastropoetics of Tao’ her Instagram account @taoleighgoffe. She tweets @taoleighgoffe.
Sous Chefs
Aree Worawongwasu is a community organizer and scholar-activist, currently pursuing her PhD in American Studies at University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, focusing on Indigenous resurgence, decolonial movements, abolition, and demilitarized futures. She is currently TAing Introduction To Indigenous Studies. She is also the Director of Communications of the Afro-Asia Group. She recently graduated with a BA from New York University, with an academic concentration in decolonization with a minor in Asian / Pacific / American Studies, where she self-designed a course of study that combined history, ethnic studies, critical race theory, gender studies, and community-engaged research. She is the President Emeritus and co-founder of the NYU Asian American Political Activism Coalition (APAC), which is an organization that politically educates and mobilizes an Asian American student movement. Her work is grounded in the grassroots, leveraging resources of the university to redistribute to local working-class communities we are in solidarity with. She has also organized with Decolonize This Place, stewarding youth organizing. Her ancestors are Mon and Teochew refugees to Thailand, and this heritage has shaped her passion for solidarity between Indigenous and displaced peoples beyond borders. She bridges her research and activism into public education.
Tatyana Tandanpolie is an avid home chef, an award-winning journalist, and a recent Journalism and Africana Studies grad from New York University. Among others, her work, “Open-Hearted: Dionte’ Johnson,” won the 2021 Gold Award in the Best Personality Profile category in the Alliance of Area Business Publishers contest, and first place in features from the 2021 all Ohio Excellence in Journalism Awards.
Ryn Stafford is a writer and performer from Saint Paul, Minnesota. She has had residencies as a poet as well as playwriting gigs in both New York and Minnesota. She badly wants to find her people.
Sadichha Karki is a Nepali-American writer, casual home cook, artist-explorer, and android based out of New England. She graduated from NYU and her writing and studies focused on the intersections of air, soil, class, race, colonialism, and sexuality; her cooking, somehow, strives to do the same. In the kitchen, her interest in food as performance and the culinary as theatre often consume her, rather than the other way around. Outside of the kitchen, she engages in speculation; she is currently writing a fantasy novel.
Arianna Qianru James is, first and foremost, a lover of condiments. Her Afro-Asian heritage and childhood in Singapore have left her with a passion for sauces, penchant for kitchen experimentation, and the profound recognition that food has the power to nourish, heal, translate, and decolonize. She is currently in her third year at the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania, where she received an M.A. in 2020. She graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in English Literature and Chinese Language & Literature from Macaulay Honors at Hunter College in 2018. In 2017, she also received a Field of Study Language Interpretation and Translation certificate in Chinese from Nanjing University and American Councils. Her research collapses the often disparate fields of African American and Asian American literature and theory together. Outside of Afro-Asian studies, Arianna’s other research and teaching interests include theories of mixedness, queerness, film, speculative fiction, and fan work.
Chefs des Partie
Chef-in-Residence (2023)
Jenny Lau is a British Chinese Londoner with roots in Malaysia and Hong Kong. She founded Celestial Peach as a multidisciplinary platform to tell and connect stories about the Chinese diaspora through the lens of food. Since 2018, she has been slowly building a grassroots community, hosting food-based events for people of East and South East Asian heritage, from potlucks and fundraising supper clubs to congee conferences. Her belief is that food is a soft power that can not only bring different communities together, but also empower individuals to feel a sense of ease with their identity. In 2022, she launched an online exhibition celebrating the 100 stories that she collected through her #ChineseFoodiesOfIG interview series, commissioning 41 artists to bring to life different answers to one question: ‘What does home taste like?’ Lau also writes An A-Z Of Chinese Food, a long-form essay series that interrogates Chinese food identity and the way it is translated and consumed in the diaspora.
Terroir Expert-in-Residence (2023)
Patricia Powell was born in Jamaica and moved with her family to the United States in 1982. Prof. Powell has taught creative writing at Harvard University, Wellesley College, MIT, and Standford University, and is currently Professor of English at Mills College in California. She is the author of A Small Gathering of Bones, The Pagoda, and The Fullness of Everything.
Commis: Do you have special skills to contribute to Kitchen Marronage? Be in touch to share a bit about what you can offer as part of our culinary community.
