Lisa Trocchia-Balkits, PhD

Lisa brings decades of experience as an educator to her role as Director of the graduate program in Transformative Food Systems at Prescott College. Extensive food systems praxis as well as transdisciplinary scholarship support her passion for the role of food systems change in leveraging transformative social change. As a member and project advisor for the Conscious Food Systems Alliance (CoFSA), an initiative of the United Nations Development Programme, she actively engages with social network design, communication, and education as conscious approaches to activating equity, collaborative self-organizing, and regenerative processes.

Dr. Trocchia is a sensory ethnographer with research interests that integrate the performance of food, cultural foodways, and the modulation of affect embodied in food spaces. Her food systems perspectives are informed by expertise in communication theory, sociology, alternative economic structures, political and critical theory, and the study of social networks and change in complex adaptive systems. She holds a Ph.D. in the Social Ecology of Food from Ohio University.