Giselle Kennedy Lord

Digital Storyteller and Author; Portland, OR

Giselle Kennedy Lord is a writer focused on biodiversity and the co-author of The Ark of Taste: Delicious and Distinctive Foods That Define the United States (2023). She holds a master's degree in gastronomy from Boston University and was named James Beard National Scholar Northwest in 2018, after a decade as a documentary videographer specializing in food and agriculture. Giselle focused her research on how people express identity and sense of place through food, particularly at the culinary crossroads of the Middle East and the Americas. She first encountered the nonprofit organization Slow Food’s the Ark of Taste, a living catalog of our food heritage and a movement to preserve gastronomic treasures passed down for generations—some rare, some endangered, all delicious—while working as the director of communications for Slow Food USA and has been an advocate of biodiversity and the preservation of historical foodways ever since. Most recently, Giselle worked as marketing manager at Neutral, the first carbon neutral food company in the United States. @gisellekennedylord (Instagram)