Michael Twitty

At Howard University, Michael Twitty trained in a setting where scholarship and cultural memory could be treated as the same discipline. That grounding shaped a practice built around Black food history, and around public history that moves beyond the page. In 2010, he worked as collaborator at D. Landreth Seed Company, a role aligned with his interest in cultivation, inheritance, and the stories held in what people grow and eat.

By 2017, that line of work had carried him to Colonial Williamsburg, where he served as revolutionary in residence, placing his perspective inside a site marked by American history and its difficult record. Since 2010, Michael Twitty has been founder and author of Afroculinaria, a platform for food, identity, and history. Since 2011, he has also been creator of the “Cooking Gene” project, extending that inquiry into ancestry and the kitchen as archive. As founder and overseer of Southern Discomfort Tour, he has continued to frame cuisine, memory, and place as subjects of interpretation, not just consumption.

At Afroculinaria, Michael Twitty works as a historical interpreter focused on African American foodways and their parent traditions in Africa and the Diaspora. The emphasis is on connection: ingredients, migrations, and the communities that carried flavor across oceans and generations. In that register, history stays material. It is handled, discussed, remembered, and tasted.

The Cooking Gene, Rice, and Koshersoul are listed as Michael Twitty’s signature dishes. Each name works as more than a menu item: it points to lineage, movement, and memory as central materials in the work. Taken together, they frame food as evidence, and as a way to read the crossings that shape his practice.