zien-celeste

Zien-Celeste (she/her) is a Louisiana-born writer, culinary educator, and multidisciplinaryartist who studies food as a living system. Her work lives at the intersection of Black feminist thought, ritual practice, land stewardship, and the politics of nourishment.

Over the past nine years, she has worked across farms, classrooms, community kitchens, and art spaces—developing programs, cultivating land, and teaching young people to see the kitchen as laboratory, classroom, and stage. Her experience includes cooking instruction for young adults at Bard College, apprenticeship at Sweet Freedom Farm, and farm management at Home Farm in New York’s Hudson Valley.

Grounded in food justice and embodied practice, Zien-Celeste examines how food can foster connection and collective care—or reproduce isolation and harm. She approaches cooking and writing as relational practices, where domestic labor becomes cultural memory and nourishment becomes political.

She is currently focused on her Substack publication, The Tender Kitchen Ecologist—an evolving digital space where she explores food, ecology, ritual, and care. The project is her attempt to build a beloved kitchen online: a place to think deeply (and mostly chit-chat), make things with our hands, and remember that feeding is a serious, beautiful act.