National Bitter Melon Council

2004 - Present

Laura Donaldson
Artist, Curator, Director of the Mills Gallery, Boston Center for the Arts
Laura Donaldson has been an active and involved member of the Boston arts scene since coming north from Kentucky to pursue her MFA in woodworking at UMass-Dartmouth. Previous to her appointment to the BCA, she was at Montserrat College of Art for five years where she spent fours years as Assistant Director and one year as Acting Director of the Gallery and Visiting Artists Program. Her work as a curator and artist has been widely covered in the press, including the Boston Globe, the Boston Herald, Art New England, and Arts Media.

George Ellmore
Professor of Plant Biology, Tufts University
George Ellmore is Associate Professor of Plant Biology and Director of the Environmental Studies Program at Tufts University. A Draupner Ring Scholar, Ellmore has a Ph.D. in plant biology from the University of California at Berkeley, and an M.A. from California State University, Chico. His area of expertise is in experimental plant anatomy and morphology as well as the pathways of water transport in wood. Ellmore’s scholarship and research has been published in biology textbooks and research journals including the American Journal of Botany and Molecular and General Genetics.

Ellie Lee
Filmmaker
Ellie Lee was born in Hong Kong and raised in Boston, where she currently resides. She is a director of documentary, fiction, and animated films that have screened in over 120 film festivals worldwide. Her charcoal-animated documentary, Repetition Compulsion, premiered in the 1998 Berlin Film Festival and became the first animated film to be broadcast on the acclaimed PBS
documentary series, P.O.V.

Featured as one of the "25 New Faces of Independent Film" in the summer 2004 issue of FILMMAKER magazine, Ellie has received numerous international fellowships and awards, and was a 2004 Rockefeller/Ford Foundation Media Arts Fellow. She also worked as a documentary producer and director of the 2005 National Emmy Award-nominated, educational PBS children's series, Postcards from Buster. At the 2004 Tribeca Film Festival, she won the Tribeca All Access Creative Promise Award for her feature screenplay, The Road Home.

Sachie Kikuchi
Mother, Food Expert
Sachie Kikuchi is the former owner of Fiamma and Farina, two popular Italian restaurants in Tokyo, Japan, and a traditional Soba restaurant. Since leaving the restaurant industry, she has been teaching cooking privately and researching recipes. Sachie lives and works in Japan.

Jan Sutton
Mother, Massage Therapist, Country Life Therapeutic Massage
Jan Sutton, a massage therapist and yoga instructor from Victoria, Minnesota has been growing and consuming Bitter Melon for the last 2 years, advocating its culinary and medicinal use in the Midwest. As ambassador of the vegetable to her local community, she shares recipes and the bounty of the Bitter Melons growing in her garden with friends and loved ones. Her enthusiasm for the gourd has brought her plentiful reward, both from the garden of the yard and the garden of the soul.

Chris Thompson
Professor of Art History, Maine College of Art, ME
Chris is Assistant Professor of Art History and Theory in the MFA Program at the Maine College of Art. His writings have appeared in Performance Research, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, Radical Philosophy, Adbusters, Domus, Print, Tate International Arts and Culture, ARTL!ES, Art New England, The Portland Phoenix, and others. He is co-editor of Ingestation: What Art Eats and is completing a book on the 1982 meeting between German artist Joseph Beuys and H.H. the XIV Dalai Lama of Tibet.

Barbara Wheaton
Culinary Historian
Barbara Wheaton is a pioneer of culinary history; co-founder (with Joyce Toomre) of the Culinary Historians of Boston; author, Savoring the Past and (with Patricia Kelly) Bibliography of Culinary History: Food Resources in Eastern Massachusetts; honorary curator of the culinary collection, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Harvard University.

Carolin Young
Author
Carolin Young is the author of Apples of Gold in Settings of Silver: Stories of Dinner as a Work of Art (Simon & Schuster, 2002), which was a finalist for the 2003 IACP award for literary food writing. In 2000 she delivered an ongoing lecture series and food event that was profiled by The New Yorker, New York magazine, Food & Wine magazine, Madison, The New York Times, The Financial Times, Food Arts, and La Nazione, among others.

Ms. Young has appeared on the Food Network's "Sara's Secrets" show and on National Public Radio's "The Splendid Table." She lectures annually at the Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery and is treasurer of the American Friends of the Oxford Symposium. She has also spoken at venues including the Institute for Advanced Studies, Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, CUNY Graduate Center for Humanities, the M.I.T. Media Lab, Washington & Lee University, Boston University, Parsons School of Design, The New School for Social Research, the French Culinary Institute, the New York Collegium, Packer Collegiate Institute, and the Culinary Historians of New York.