The Fictional Recipe: How Food and Storytelling Intertwine

Marya Kayyal is a pastry chef, culinary storyteller, and women’s wellness facilitator from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. After completing a Master’s in Science at McMaster University, where she researched the relationship between gut health and the mind, Kayyal obtained her pastry diploma from Le Cordon Bleu, Paris. She is also a certified health and wellness coach and is trained in leading holistic women's circles. Kayyal combines her areas of expertise to bring culturally grounded awareness to gastronomic experiences through her initiative, Of the Land. OTL hosts workshops and supper clubs that foster conscious connections with people, their land and culinary heritage. Kayyal ultimately believes in the power of food as a medium to nourish, express, and build community.

Nahla Tabbaa is an interdisciplinary  artist, chef and curator whose practice explores tensions between the urban and the organic, the beautiful and the grotesque. Sensitive to the self-organising agency of materials, she adventures into the world of immateriality and the intangible through experiments in alchemy and combining elements from the organic and inorganic. As an act of resistance, she leans into alternative constructs of time and ancient practices as a way to summon magic in the mundane everyday. She sees our present state as a catastrophic dystopian world that can no longer be dismantled with human hands, but rather, she is seeking wisdom in the more-than-human world. Through working with invasive and indigenous plants, plant medicine, hiking, animal care and reading into regional mythology and folklore, her work moves towards a place where she can propose a new system of radical care and the sacred.

Her mediums are sculpture, drawing, alchemy, research and the culinary arts. 

Alem is a researcher and writer interweaving environmental and urban histories with mythology and fiction. In 2021, she co-founded Khunfus, an independent publishing house based in Jeddah, where she acts as general manager and editor-in-chief of Khunfus’s three upcoming titles. Outside of her work in publishing, Alem works at Art Jameel as Senior Manager of Learning and Research, where she oversees learning programs and spaces including Hayy Explorers and Jameel Library, including its collections, archives, and research programs. Before joining Art Jameel, Alem was the in-house researcher at Darat Safeya Binzagr, where she led on translating her recently launched book Darzah from Arabic to English. Alem's academic background sits at the intersection of Philosophy, Middle East Studies, Gender, Environmental Humanities, and Museology with a geographic focus on the port city of Jeddah and its wider entanglements.

AlMatrooshi is a multimedia conceptual artist born in Dubai who currently lives and works in Sharjah, UAE. Her practice sheds light on narratives from both ancient and contemporary mythologies from the Arabian Peninsula, with research investigating food & territorial knowledge and how they have been shaped across time, spanning agricultural practices, imperial impositions, and postcolonial realities. Almatrooshi has a BFA in arts and creative enterprises from Zayed University, Dubai, an MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art, London, and a diploma in culinary arts from ICCA Dubai. She writes and has published works that use food as literary tool in Arablit Quarterly and with CIC in Cairo, Egypt. 
She is an alumna and faculty fellow of the Salama bint Hamdan AlNahyan Emerging Artists Fellowship, Abu Dhabi. She currently works as a pastry chef alongside running her art practice.