Leslie Soble (she/her) manages the Food in Prison Project and is the lead author of Impact Justice’s national report, Eating Behind Bars: Ending the Hidden Punishment of Food in Prison. An ethnographer and folklorist, she has spent over five years immersed in research on the carceral eating experience and its impacts on individuals, communities, and the environment. In her current role, she oversees the organization’s initiatives at the intersection of food and incarceration.
Beyond Impact Justice, Leslie is the founder and artistic director of Story Soup, a project that creates contexts for dialogue across cultural and generational borders through food and narrative. Her ongoing academic research focuses on food as a cultural text, aesthetic domain, and site of performance. Leslie also serves as a teaching artist with various DC-based arts programs and has over a decade of experience designing and facilitating cultural competency workshops to explore identity, systems of oppression, and intercultural/intergenerational communication.
Leslie holds an MA in cultural sustainability from Goucher College, with a focus on the intersection of foodways, narrative theory, and social practice art, and received her BA in gender studies from Brown University, where her course of study focused on grassroots movements for social change.
