CORE TEAM
Geoffrey Drummond is Executive Director of The Food Lab at SUNY Stony Brook/Southampton. He is a producer/director of culinary programs for television and digital media applications. Over a 40 year career in film and television, Geof was president of Saga Productions (producer of the cult classic My Dinner with Andre) and president of A La Carte Communications, where he produced and collaborated with Julia Child, helping to bring food and cooking television to generations of culinary fans. Geof also created/produced food series for TV starring Lidia Bastianich, Jacques Pépin, Martin Yan, The Frugal Gourmet, America’s Test Kitchen, Eric Ripert and numerous others. Geof is the recipient of ten National Emmy Awards and more than a dozen James Beard Awards. A graduate of Cornell University and (graduate school at) Stanford University, he is a member of the Smithsonian Institute Kitchen Cabinet, has served as a member of the City Harvest Food Council, and on the boards of the Yale-New Haven Children’s Hospital and the American Institute of Food and Wine.
Judiann Carmack-Fayyaz is a USDA award-winning high school and university educator specializing in Agriculture, Food Education and Technology. Skilled at creating programs for career readiness, Judiann works to close the skills gap so people in transition can pursue the in-demand jobs of a changing economy and create new opportunities for themselves.
A strong advocate for universal access to good, clean, and fair food, Judiann has held leadership positions in Slow Food East End (Chair) and Slow Food USA (NY State Slow Food Governor) and co-founded the Edible School Gardens network. Judiann holds university degrees in Educational Leadership, Agriculture, and French and has served as a Work-Based Learning and Career and Technical Education Coordinator. She is currently working with Stony Brook University’s FoodLab as the Program Director.
For the last 17 years, most recently as Associate Provost, Robert Reeves has led the design, development, and growth of the academic, advanced training, publishing, and community programs that have been recently gathered within the new Lichtenstein Center. Spanning three Stony Brook locations –Southampton, West Campus and the Manhattan Center for Creative Writing and Film – these programs include not only FoodLab, founded in 2014, but four new degrees and three minors in Creative Writing, Film, and Writing for TV, a nationally prominent literary journal (TSR: The Southampton Review), innovative training in podcast and manuscript development (BookEnds), all supported in part by fundraising, including the Lichtenstein Reeves Endowment Fund. Reeves is also the author of two well-regarded novels, as well as screenplays, short fiction, essays, and literary criticism.
Kathleen Russo produces the podcast/radio show Here’s The Thing with Alec Baldwin (a Stony Brook/Southampton and WNYC production). Past credits include: two movies with academy award winning director Steven Soderbergh (Gray’s Anatomy, And Everything Is Going Fine) and an Obie-award winning play called Spalding Gray: Stories Left To Tell.