Lynn Peemoeller has grown a body of work that challenges perceptions and creates dialogue sparked with activism about the past present and future role of food in context to urban systems. She weaves together knowledge from agriculture, urban design, public policy, planning, food culture and social practice. Work addresses the human interaction with the complex cycle of food from the ground to the fork to the garbage dump, examining both negative and positive states of humanity, development and experience shaped by food. Learned as a food systems planner, her work addresses the question: how will we feed ourselves in the future?
Lynn is new to St.Louis. She moved from Chicago where she organized the annual Food Policy Conference for the Good Food Festival and the Chicago Food Policy 2017 Summit. She is working to expand opportunities for food and art to intersect in public and private spaces. And she has co-founded LEEPWORKS with Eric Ellingsen (Washington University, Dept. Architecture & Landscape Architecture), an experiential education design practice for urban connections therapy.
A lifetime of interest in all aspects of food led Lynn to work-study at farms in Ohio, Hawaii, and Virginia and to work with community based projects in agricultural areas of Bulgaria and Thailand and Armenia. Interested in food cultures, Lynn has collaborated with cooks from all over the world to study and archive food traditions. In recent years while in Ethiopia, Lynn started a website archive of traditional Ethiopian recipes and food stories www.goorsha.net in order to document, preserve and share access to Ethiopian food culture which is traditionally passed on orally.
In the late 1990’s she oranized and managed farmers markets including Greenmarket in New York City and Chicago’s Green City Market where she was market manager for three years. In Chicago, she was the Urban Agriculture Liaison for the City of Chicago Dept. of Cultural Affairs, then became Program Director of Family Farmed, acted as Co-Chair of the Chicago Food Policy Action Council and was on the board of Slow Food Chicago. After establishing her own practice; partnerships and clients included the Chicago Botanic Gardens, Slow Food USA, The City of Chicago, Growing Home, and Growing Power. She has taught Food Systems and Urban Agriculture at IIT and lectured for Günther Vogt on Urban Agriculture at ETH in Zürich.
From 2009-2014 Lynn lived and worked in Berlin, Germany. Collaborations with artists such as Olafur Eliasson, architects such as RaumLabor, farmers and cooks led to the emergence of social practice and artistic intent within her food systems work. The shift of approach was built on increasingly interactive public actions to address topics of the food system and new alliances for public and private spaces in which to perform and conduct the work. Recently, Lynn’s work has been featured at the Science Gallery in Dublin, Institut für Raumexperimente in Berlin, Fugelbjerggaard Farm in Denmark, Artecytia in Thessaloniki, Greece, Berlin Food and Art Week and Paris Food and Art Week and Outside Design at the Sullivan Gallery in Chicago.
M.U.P.P. University of Illinois, Chicago
B.A. Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH