Cheyenne Bardos

When my family migrated from the Philippines to regional Australia, food was how we connected in a foreign world - from sharing Filipino salpicao with my classmates to braiding koulourakia with my Greek babysitter. I saw early on how cooking together, sharing a meal, and copying recipes can build community and carry cultural knowledge between generations. Making food sparked as much creative expression as picking up a paintbrush, and gave us belonging and pride in caring for each other.

Building a career across food and the arts, I realised the ordinariness that gives food this power is also why it's overlooked. Though food is celebrated here as commercial industry, it's rarely recognised or funded as serious creative and cultural practice. I've built my work around bridging that gap: independently as a producer, cook and writer, a food and culture commentator on ABC Radio, and as Producer of the Powerhouse Museum's Food Program.

My projects - cooking classes tracing recipes adapted through migration, pop-up dinners with refugee chefs, edible exhibitions uniting cooks, filmmakers and artists - celebrate and explore identity, history and memory through food. I'm equally passionate about improving the conditions for this work, co-authoring a policy paper at the Committee for Sydney advocating regulatory change for street food vendors.

From grassroots collaborations to research with The Sydney Morning Herald and UNSW, I've met incredible people in this space - bush tucker lessons in community gardens, culinary workshops in galleries - often led by women, migrants and First Nations people. But this work falls between the categories our institutions know how to fund, so it rarely has structures to grow. My Churchill Fellowship takes me to community-led initiatives overseas combining food and creative programming, to learn from them and bring back practical approaches that help communities here lead this work.