Meet our 2026-2027 scholars
Millicent Kasal
2026 Scholarship Recipient - Agriculture
Millicent M. Kasal is a visionary leader, land steward, technology director, beekeeper, educator, and doctoral student in Visionary Practice and Regenerative Leadership at Southwestern College in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her work explores the intersections of land, spirituality, foodways, ancestral memory, relational ways of knowing, and regenerative community healing. She founded Mama's Honey Haus LLC and stewards The Remembering, a five-acre woodland sanctuary in Scandia, Minnesota, where she cultivates a future centered on ecological reciprocity, education, and collective restoration.
Millicent serves her community through nonprofit leadership, volunteering, agriculture, death care, and youth engagement, while advancing projects that honor women, families, and more-than-human kin. As a writer and researcher, she is especially interested in land as pedagogy, African and Indigenous spiritual traditions, and the ways memory and relationship shape sustainable futures.
Inspired by Edna Lewis' reverence for seasonality, place, Southern foodways, and cultural memory, Millicent is honored to carry her legacy forward through scholarship, stewardship, storytelling, and service. She believes food, land, and story can become vessels for remembrance together.
Kwesi Ferebee
2026 Scholarship Recipient - Culinary Arts
A Portsmouth, Virginia native, Kwesi Ferebee is a culinary student at Holyoke Community College’s MGM Culinary Arts Institute.
Kwesi came to cooking after three decades as a visual artist. His work centers on the preservation and reclamation of African American and African diasporic foodways. He is the creator of Blackened, a zine exploring diasporic ingredients and food histories. He is also developing Arrows & Orchids, a supper club named in honor of his parents, conceived as the experiential counterpart to Blackened and built at the crossroads where African American, African, and Caribbean traditions meet. His dream is to open a brick-and- mortar restaurant where the full expanse of the diaspora can be tasted in one room.
He will use his scholarship to fund his culinary training as the next stage in his journey. He is deeply grateful to the Edna Lewis Foundation for this recognition, and for Edna Lewis herself, whose work returned him to the Virginia he grew up in.
Jordan Wimby
2026 Scholarship Recipient - Food Studies/Writing
Jordan Wimby is a Chicago-based food historian, chef, educator, and storyteller whose work lives at the intersection of food, history, childhood, and cultural identity.
For more than a decade, she has worked with children while also building a career rooted in food and public history, including work as a private chef and living-history interpreter. She played a leading role in the research and development for Michael W. Twitty’s The American South, with a focus on Black foodways and culinary history, and continues to use food as a tool for storytelling, education, and cultural memory.
Jordan looks forward to working with the Edna Lewis Foundation to further grow and expand Hungry Little Neighbors, her children’s food education publication and project centered on Black foodways, using storytelling, recipes, sensory exploration, and hands-on learning to help young children understand culture, history, identity, and community through food.
The Edna Lewis Foundation Scholar Network
Celebrating past recipients of The Edna Lewis Foundation Scholarship program.
2025 Scholar Recipient - Agriculture
FREDERICK WILLIAM KIMANI ANKU KENNER
Frederick Kenner is the Healthy Market Leader at Martha's Table in Washington, D.C., a nonprofit organization whose mission it is to "support strong children, strong families, and strong communities" with a focus on developing gardening skills as well as teaching children and families to cook their produce for nutritious meals. He plans to use his scholarship to further develop workshops on his farm to teach folks how to grow their own food, keep bees for honey and beeswax, how to raise chickens for eggs and food, and how to use their homegrown food in the kitchen.
2025 Scholar Recipient - Culinary Arts
HALIMA SALAZAR
Halima Salazar is the Farm Program Coordinator at Brown's Herb and Mushroom Farm outside Oxford, Mississippi, and co-owner and chef of Gimbia's Kitchen and Justevia Teas. Halima crafts culinary experiences which explore the intersection of the foodways of her native Nigeria and the American South as experienced through farm culture. Her dream is to open a West African restaurant with homegrown food and animals wherein she can continue to explore narrative dining as a way to understand the influence and presence of West African cooking in the Americas. She will use her scholarship to continue promoting her Gimbia's Kitchen popups as the next stage in her journey.
2025 Scholar Recipient - Food Studies/Writing
JESSICA KEHINDE NGO
Jessica Kehinde Ngo is an Associate Professor of English at Otis College of Art and Design. In addition to her teaching work, she reviews manuscripts for aspiring writers, while pursuing her own writing exporing the BIPOC experience through food and culture. Her current project is a book about the role of plantains in her life. She will use her scholarship to fund research and travel expenses for her book, which will be called Half Nigerian/Fully Plantain. She is based in Los Angeles, California.
2021 Scholar Recipient - Agriculture
ELIZABETH BRYANT
Elizabeth Bryant grew up in small town Minnesota and is a lifelong student of the Minnesota River Valley. Elizabeth is interested in policies and practices that will help protect land so that it may be stewarded by Black people and people of color. She believes that the impending transition of much of this country's farmland must have plans in place to support land ownership by emerging stewards. She knows land in the hands of these stewards could begin to heal many of our relationships to rural landscapes and foodways.
Elizabeth is a member of the Midwest Farmers of Color Collective, Burn Something Collective and the Minnesota Department of Agriculture's inaugural Emerging Farmers Working Group. She's studied history, Black studies, literature and filmmaking. Generous support from the Edna Lewis Foundation will allow Elizabeth to continue work with rural community organizations and an emerging Black land trust to create models for land transitions, and to secure land within a growing ecosystem of Black land stewards.
2021 Scholar Recipient - Culinary Arts
CLIFFORD HUNT
Clifford (Cliff) is a New York City culinarian born and raised on Chicago’s South Side. He is a graduate of Morehouse College, where he received his BA in International Studies. During his matriculation in college, his mother's unexpected passing catapulted him to discover his true passion – food and cooking.
After completing culinary school at the International Culinary Center, Cliff decided to embark on an unconventional career path by creating pop-ups, catering, teaching classes, and working as a personal chef under his business, Culinary Cliff. However, Cliff yearned to find opportunities in food full-time to learn more about the business of the industry and expand his culinary horizons. That led him to other career opportunities, such as being a chef assistant at ICE, recipe testing with HelloFresh, and a leadership role with Union Square Hospitality Group.
Cliff is proud and honored to be a recipient of the Edna Lewis Scholarship. He will use this grant as support for the remainder of his graduate studies. Cliff will continue to pursue his love for food while building a future venture that intersects his enthusiasm for food with his knack for intercultural experiences, business operations, and healing himself and his community.
2021 Scholar Recipient - Food Studies/Writing
SAVANNAH LEONE BUNDY
Savannah Leone Bundy is an artist and scientist from Oakland, California. After graduating high school she studied graphic design, fashion design and culinary arts before moving to Brooklyn, New York, where she worked in various fields, and ultimately founded and operated skincare company Dimple & Dot Homemade.
Now, having moved back home, Savannah is currently pursuing an associate degree in Baking at Laney College in Oakland. She is a lifelong student of the culinary arts and plans to use this formal education as the basis for her exploration and documentation of cooking as an intersection of art and science. In addition, Savannah will be studying the diasporic nature of Black American cuisine and writing about her findings.
Receiving the Edna Lewis Foundation Scholarship for Storytelling is an incredible honor and Savannah is looking forward to following in the footsteps of Ms. Lewis herself as a chef, writer and pioneer.
2020 Scholar Recipient - Agriculture
ORLANDO JOHNSON
Orlando Johnson is an herbalist, activist, musician, inter-disciplinary artist, and steward of Gray’s Manor Farm, a permaculture site in Port Republic, Calvert County Maryland.
Orlando trained as a visual artist. His creative work feeds his spirit and roots him in an expansive sense of community. Johnson’s output is multi-faceted. He has organized multi-media exhibitions in support of Indigenous people’s land rights. He has performed music and dance in venues along the eastern seaboard, including at the High Zero festival in Baltimore. However, the work that moves Orlando most deeply, is his work with the land.
For thirteen years, Orlando has dedicated himself to re-tuning and nurturing land that has been in his family since 1830. Johnson seeks to continue Gray’s Manor Farm’s tradition of providing grounding space for young people of color and the LGBTQ community living in Baltimore and Washington D.C.. Orlando envisions Gray’s Manor as a space for interdependence with the land and supportive social bonds, a sustainable Black-owned permaculture farm and wellness center. The Edna Lewis Foundation Scholars grant for Agriculture is in support of Orlando’s work on the farm.
2020 Scholar Recipient - Culinary Arts
QUAYLA ALLEN
Quayla Allen is a Pittsburgh native and Black feminist foodie. Her identity in the food space is heavily influenced by both her women’s college education and everlasting love for Black women. It’s an ode to her mother who first introduced food as a love language and a reconciliation of her mother’s dream deferred. As a product of the support and grace of Black
women, Quayla engages them in harnessing their agency to create pathways to meaningful careers. In the wake of the devastating pandemic, her work will extend to designing equity-based solutions to increase access for Black women of color in the creation of sustainable careers within the food & beverage industry.
A graduate of the defunct Chatham College for Women at Chatham University, Quayla holds a BA in Professional Communications and has served as a talent and diversity strategist in higher education, management consulting, and film & media. Nearly six years after leaving Chatham University, she’s returning as a Master of Arts, Food Studies (MAFS) candidate, where she’ll gain a holistic and equity-based view of the food system, from agriculture and food production to cuisines and consumption.
Quayla is honored to be a 2020 recipient of the Edna Lewis Foundation Scholarship! The generous gift will apply to tuition and expenses related to her fall coursework and unpaid internship at The Center for Regional Agriculture, Food, and Transformation (CRAFT) at Chatham University.
2020 Scholar Recipient - Food Studies/Writing
JAHSHANA OLIVIERRE
Jahshana is a documentarian from Canarsie, Brooklyn who collects and documents stories and practices of healing within Black communities. She is interested in the relationship between trauma and cultural memory and practice. Using what is accessible to her, Jahshana works to create healing moments, spaces and repositories that assist individuals and communities with remembering, connecting with and documenting their histories.
Zetwal Arkive is a mobile healing library and apothecary that creates sacred space for the people to reckon with and reconcile their pasts in the present. Through herbal education, guided reflection and documentation for one's own keeping, Zetwal seeks to center and affirm Black peoples' healing journeys. The Edna Lewis Foundation Scholars grant will support Jahshana in the process of designing Zetwal’s digital and physical mobile libraries.