Adrian’s professional foundation began in architecture, urban planning, transportation, and community development. That training taught her to look beyond individual buildings and consider the larger systems connecting people to neighborhoods, infrastructure, land, opportunity, and one another.Architecture gave Adrian a way of understanding how things are built. Planning taught her to ask who they are built for.

Food had always been part of Adrian’s story, but hospitality revealed something larger: a restaurant could function as more than a place to eat.

Through Uptowne Café & Bakery, Adrian began bringing together food, design, culture, entrepreneurship, and community. The restaurant became a gathering place and a testing ground for an idea that continues to shape her work today—that hospitality can create connection, preserve culture, support local economies, and help build community.

The kitchen wasn’t a departure from architecture and planning. It was another way of practicing them.

The deeper Adrian moved into food, the further upstream her questions traveled.

Who grows our food? Who owns the land? Whose agricultural knowledge has been preserved—and whose has been overlooked? What happens to food traditions when communities lose access to the land that sustained them?

Those questions helped shape the 40 Acres Project and Adrian’s continuing work around Black agriculture, land ownership, foodways, and cultural preservation.

Food begins long before it reaches the kitchen. It begins with land.

For Adrian, preserving foodways means more than recording recipes or documenting history. Culture remains alive when knowledge continues to be practiced—when seeds are planted, ingredients are grown, food is prepared, stories are shared, and traditions are passed from one generation to the next.

This belief is central to her work with the Muloma Heritage Center, where African Atlantic foodways are explored through agriculture, culinary practice, research, education, and the knowledge held within communities.

Adrian’s work asks us to think about preservation differently: not simply as protecting what came before, but as creating the land, spaces, and opportunities that allow cultural knowledge to continue living, evolving, and being passed forward

Adrian’s work moves between research and practice, using each to challenge and inform the other. Her background in architecture and urban planning shaped a curiosity about how people experience land, place, community, and change. Her work in food expanded those questions to include culture, agriculture, history, migration, and memory.

Through research, writing, lectures, and hands on teaching, Adrian brings these ideas together and creates opportunities for others to explore them. Her classroom might be a university lecture hall, a kitchen, a farm, a historic site, or gathered around a fire.

For Adrian, teaching is not simply about passing down information. It is about creating space for questions, exchange, and discovery, giving people the tools to carry that knowledge forward in their own work and communities.

home. Through culinary diplomacy, international residencies, travel, and cultural exchange, she has explored how food connects people across geography, language, history, and tradition.

These experiences have created opportunities to cook alongside chefs, farmers, artisans, and cultural knowledge keepers while learning how ingredients, techniques, agriculture, preservation, and food traditions move between people and places.

Each journey brings new questions and perspectives back to Adrian’s work. Cultural exchange is not simply about sharing what you know. It is about being willing to listen, learn, and understand how someone else’s relationship with food and place can change the way you see your own.