Art and Social Justice Fellow:
Krystal C. Mack
Krystal C. Mack is a self-taught designer and artist using her social practice to highlight food and nature’s role in collective healing, empowerment, and decolonization. Through comestible and social design, Krystal seeks to publicly unpack and heal personal traumas relevant to her lived experience as an Autistic Black woman. A critical element of her work involves the exploration of food and nature beyond the limits of traditional consumption. Krystal uses food design to construct spaces for dialogue and inquiry into the cultivation, or lack thereof, of sustainable and accessible practices supporting or hindering reparative futures for marginalized communities. With her practice, she creates worlds and objects that invite the community to engage with food and the more-than-human world in multi-dimensional ways that elicit a sensory call and response, acting as a transformative tool for all. Krystal’s work has been highlighted by the New York Times, NPR, Food & Wine Magazine, and MOLD Magazine. She has been named a “Woman to Watch” by the Baltimore Sun and featured on the Cherry Bombe 100 Women in Food list by Cherry Bombe Magazine as a food industry “Change Agent.” Krystal currently resides in her hometown of Baltimore, Maryland.