Safiya Robinson (Sisterwoman)

Artists

Safiya Robinson is a chef, researcher, interdisciplinary facilitator and culinary artist exploring food as a relational technology of care.

Inspired by her Black American, Jamaican and British heritage, her culinary focus centres modern soul food through a distinctly London lens: thoughtful, deeply considered plant-forward cooking that layers bold flavour, cultural memory and contemporary expression. 

Across her practice, she is interested in what food can reveal about identity, belonging, inheritance and the ways cultural knowledge is carried, transformed and sustained. Historically, the culinary has often been relegated to the realm of hospitality; seen as service rather than a site of artistic, political, or conceptual inquiry. Safiya’s work actively challenges this division, using food as a medium through which to explore questions of care, culture and collective life.

Safiya is a 2026 recipient of the Oxford Symposium of Food and Cookery Young Chef award. She was recognised by Code Hospitality’s Top 100 Women in Hospitality (2021) and 30 Under 30 (2024), and featured in British Vogue, The Guardian, and Bloomberg, among others. Her year-long debut restaurant residency was named the number one vegan restaurant in London by Time Out.

2025

In 2025, we commissioned Safiya to faciliate a six-week series of intergenerational cooking workshops in partnership with Southwark Youth Justice Service (SYJS) and Appleby Blue.

The young people from SYJS were aged 14–17. SYJS operates a trauma-informed, systemic approach to supporting children and families in Southwark, and this framework informed the design and delivery of the workshops. The sessions prioritised care, trust, and collaboration, using food as an accessible and non-verbal entry point into conversations about identity, memory, and cultural inheritance, using culinary practice as a tool for intergenerational connection, reflection, and care.

The workshops centred Safiya’s approach of Intentional Nourishment, combining grounding practices, collective cooking, and sensory exploration to create spaces where participants could engage with memory in embodied and accessible ways.

Earlier in 2025, Safiya joined us for our Community Day, serving vegan canapés as part of a creative and fun day for families.

Resources

Resources

Resource: Twelve, drug and alcohol misuse

These resources offer a range of reference materials around drug and alcohol misuse, focusing on movies, music, art and books.

Resource list

Article: Emily Druiff, Reactivating the archive

Emily Druiff, Trustee and Founder of Peckham Platform discusses Southwark Education Resource Project (SERP) Reactivated and the significance of archives in the spring 2018 issue of The National Society for Education in Art & Design’s AD magazine.

Article

Case study: Southwark Education Research Project testimonials

Barbara Steveni introduces the methodology behind the radical Southwark Education Research Project (SERP)(1989-95).

Case study

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Meet the Team