Nina F. Ichikawa is the former Executive Director and before that, Policy Director for the Berkeley Food Institute, an interdisciplinary research and action center on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley. Nina is an alum of the USDA’s “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food” initiative and was a Food and Community Fellow for the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy from 2011-2013, where she launched AAPIFoodAction.org, the nation’s first food policy platform for Asian Americans and Pacific Islander voters. 

Her writing has been published in the New York Times, Civil Eats, Grist, Al-Jazeera America, NBC Asian America, Vogue, Amerasia Journal, Rafu Shimpo and the Nichi Bei Times. In 2009 she launched the Food and Agriculture section for Hyphen magazine, based in San Francisco. Her writings on Asian American farmers and retailers were published in Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader (NYU Press: 2013).

Selected by the Japanese Ministry of Education for the Mombusho Graduate Fellowship, she spent four years in rural and urban Japan, helping to establish an environmental publishing house in Tokyo and working closely with the Japanese organic and biodynamic farming movements.   

Nina received an M.A. in International Relations/Food Policy from Meiji Gakuin University and a B.A. with honors in Interdisciplinary Studies from UC Berkeley.