Von Diaz is an Emmy Award-winning documentarian, food historian, and author of Islas: A Celebration of Tropical Cooking, and Coconuts & Collards: Recipes and Stories from Puerto Rico to the Deep South.
Born in Puerto Rico and raised in Atlanta, GA, she explores food, culture, and identity. In addition to her debut culinary memoir, she has contributed recipes and essays to a number of cookbooks and anthologies. She is also the founder of La Piña—a Substack newsletter covering the people, ingredients, and systems that shape global cuisine. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, StoryCorps, Food & Wine Magazine, and Bon Appétit, among many others. She is currently a Senior Producer at StoryCorps, where she’s produced audio for animations, radio broadcasts for NPR’s Morning Edition, and contributed hundreds of interviews to the organization’s vast oral history archive in the Library of Congress.
In addition, she taught food studies and oral history at Duke University and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and food writing and audio production workshops at New York University and The New School.
Von received a B.A. in Women’s Studies from Agnes Scott College. She went on to receive a dual M.A. in Journalism and Latin American and Caribbean Studies from New York University, where she completed a Tinker Field Research Fellowship to record oral histories of elder LGBTQ communities in Havana, Cuba.
9:30 am - 11:30 am
