Kat Kinsman

Title: Executive Features Editor, Food & Wine

Location: New York City

Kat Kinsman is an award-winning writer, editor, public speaker, and host with over 17 years of experience creating food and beverage-based stories, essays, videos, podcasts, events, books, and live news commentary for Food & Wine, CNN, HLN, Extra Crispy, Tasting Table, Roads & Kingdoms, Gravy, Saveur, AOL, and other media outlets. She's a sought-after keynote speaker, moderator, and discussion facilitator on the topics of food and mental health, and created the Chefs With Issues initiative in 2016 to address the mental health crisis in the hospitality industry. Her book Hi, Anxiety: Life With a Bad Case of Nerves was published by Harper Collins in 2016. She hosts Food & Wine's Signal Award Gold-winning Tinfoil Swans podcast.

Expertise: food culture, hospitality industry, cocktails, personal essays.

Experience: Kat Kinsman worked as an artist's assistant, art director, webmaster, copywriter, and ad agency creative before taking her first role in food media as AOL's grilling editor in 2007.

Kinsman created and helmed the Eatocracy food blog for CNN in 2010 and was a frequent on-air contributor for the network across TV and radio, as well as in-person events. Eatocracy won the EPPY Award for Best Food Website with 1 million unique monthly visitors and over in 2011 and was nominated in 2012 and 2013, and Kinsman and colleagues were nominated for a James Beard Award for TV Segment in 2013. At CNN, she also developed the Matrimony section and First Person essay series for CNN Living. She was also part of the CNN team that won a Peabody Award for ongoing coverage of the Gulf Oil Spill.

At Tasting Table, Kinsman served as editor-in-chief before moving to a role as editor at large as she completed her first book, Hi, Anxiety, Life With a Bad Case of Nerves, which was published by Harper Collins in 2016.

Kinsman's role as a chef confidante led her to create the Chefs With Issues initiative in 2016 to offer community and resources to people in the hospitality industry struggling with mental health issues. That work has allowed Kinsman to give keynote speeches, moderate panels, and facilitate conversations to groups around the world, including MAD Symposium, Food on the Edge, Artiskmat, Tales of the Cocktail, SXSW, McLean Hospital, AMEX Trade, the Colorado Restaurant Association, Unilever's Fair Kitchens, and others.

As senior food & drinks editor at Time Inc's Extra Crispy, Kinsman was one of the creative team launching the gloriously irreverent site that celebrated all things breakfast, and co-edited the site's book Breakfast: The Most Important Book About the Best Meal of the Day. There, she launched the cult-favorite and celebrity-studded cooking show No Pressure, which garnered millions of views as well as loving coverage by Decider, which praised its "delightfully disturbing Lovecraftian vibe."

At Food & Wine, Kinsman hosted 100 episodes of the podcast Communal Table, conversing with the world's most influential chefs, cookbook authors, celebrities, and writers on topics such as mental health, race and identity, equity and inclusion, the business of hospitality, and yes — cooking, and she currently hosts Food & Wine's Tinfoil Swans podcast, which won Gold in the Signal Awards in 2024. Kinsman edited James Beard Award-winning personal essays in 2018 and 2022. Her own writing across print and digital won a 2024 International Association of Culinary Professionals Award for Narrative Writing With Recipes (with a second piece nominated in the same category) and the 2020 Award for Personal Essay/Memoir. Her stories were also included in the 2020 and 2016 editions of The Best American Food Writing. In 2020, Kinsman won the Meredith-wide MVP Award.

Kinsman previously served as the vice chair of the James Beard Journalism Committee.