Valencia Jackson

In August 2024, the Dominican Republic Ministry of Tourism launched its "Taste the Paradise" campaign at the Faena Forum in Miami Beach, the first stop in a promotional tour that continued on to Toronto, New York, Los Angeles, and Colombia. Valencia led public relations for the Miami activation alongside the destination's Brickell-based tourism office, aligning luxury lifestyle media, hospitality influencers, and travel trade press around the launch.

Event Highlights at the Faena Forum

Rem Koolhaas's Faena Forum gave the campaign an architectural, premium setting to carry the Dominican Republic's brand into an immersive, upscale sensory experience, built around iconic destinations, including the Paseo de Doña Blanca, the Ojos Indígenas Ecological Reserve, and Frontón Beach. Tourism Minister David Collado led the messaging, positioning Dominican "flavor" as something that extends past cuisine into the warmth, music, and spirit of its people, a campaign built across the destinations of Punta Cana, Samaná, and Puerto Plata. Miami served as the official kickoff for the promotional tour's wider run through key North and South American and European markets.

Press Coverage

The launch generated coverage across luxury lifestyle, travel trade, and advertising press in the US, Canada, and beyond.

The Art Institute of Chicago's 2019 to 2020 presentation of Andy Warhol, From A to B and Back Again, the first major U.S. retrospective of the artist's work in three decades, gave Terzo Piano, the museum's restaurant inside the Modern Wing, an opening to extend the exhibition beyond the gallery walls. Valencia was part of the team behind the communications and brand strategy that turned a seasonal menu into a full culinary counterpart to the exhibition, running the length of its Chicago engagement, working in coordination with Kati Murphy, the museum's Executive Director of Public Affairs, and Chef Carolina Diaz, Terzo Piano's Chef de Cucina.

Research First

Before a single dish was written, the work began with Warhol himself: his commercial art beginnings, his fixation on repetition and celebrity, and the muses who defined the Factory era, Edie Sedgwick chief among them. That research shaped every layer of the guest experience, translated into course names, plating references, and the small design details that told guests they had entered the exhibition rather than left it.

The Menu

Working alongside Chef Carolina Diaz, the current and first female World Pasta Champion, the team built a menu that treated Warhol's most recognizable works, his soup cans, his flowers, his screen-printed portraits, as a starting point for original dishes rather than a costume for existing ones. Coordination with Terzo Piano's sommelier extended the concept through a dedicated cocktail program and a matching dessert menu, so the Warhol narrative carried through an entire meal rather than stopping at the entree.

The Menu, Dish by Dish

The menu ran from 20 October 2019 to 26 January 2020, the length of the retrospective's Chicago engagement. Chef di Cucina Carolina Diaz built the savory courses, Sous Chef Ron Bushby ran the line, pastry chef Rachel Erceg built the dessert program, and Wine Director Cathy Mantuano curated the pairings. Each dish took a specific Warhol work or a documented Warhol habit as its brief. Selected courses appear below, each linking to its photograph in the published campaign archive; the full menu ran longer across the savory, cocktail, and dessert programs.

• Flowers

  A salad of roasted vegetables and micro arugula, named for and built from Warhol's 1964 canvas of the same name.

  After Flowers, 1964

  See the plate · @terzopianochicago

• The Warhol Burger

  A double Angus patty with lettuce, tomato, cheddar, and housemade fries, served as the artist's own New York diet.

  After Warhol's documented diner habits

  See the plate · @terzopianochicago

• Warhol Takeout

  Egg noodles with black bean sauce, garlic, shrimp, and red cabbage, plated in a takeout carton.

  After "Food is indeed my great extravagance, but I like leftovers"

  See the plate · @terzopianochicago

• Cod in Coconut Saffron Broth

  Cod over pearl white barley, plated across a black-and-white ground that answered the ink-blot canvases directly.

  After Rorschach, 1984

  See the plate · @terzopianochicago

• The Bloody Mary

  Reposado tequila, ancho chile liqueur, tomato, celery bitters, and lime, a soup can rebuilt as a cocktail.

  After Campbell's Soup Cans, 1962

  See the plate · @terzopianochicago

• Sticky Fingers

  A cocktail named for the 1971 Rolling Stones album, for which Warhol designed the cover.

  After Sticky Fingers album art, 1971

  See the plate · @terzopianochicago

• The Debbie Harry

  An ice cream drink in a coupe under cotton candy, paying homage to Warhol's love of ice cream.

  After Warhol's Debbie Harry portrait, 1980

  See the plate · @terzopianochicago

• Cherry Coke Float

  Cherry Coca-Cola granita, root beer ice cream, and shattered sweet and sour lime glass.

  After Warhol's Coca-Cola works and his writing on Coke

  See the plate · @terzopianochicago

• Andy-Mats

  A TV dinner served on a school tray: malted banana and Nutella ice cream sandwich, cinnamon milk, and pudding, by pastry chef Rachel Erceg.

  After "ANDY-MATS, The Restaurant for the Lonely Person"

  See the plate · @terzopianochicago

Valencia handled public relations and social media creative direction across the run, which meant the announcement of each dish, the direction of the campaign photography, and the writing that connected a plate back to the canvas it came from. The campaign imagery was shot by Chicago photographer Neil John Burger.

Accuracy and Estate Coordination

Because the menu referenced a real artist, a real estate, and real people from his circle, the work required the same discretion as any brand or reputation engagement: coordinating with the Andy Warhol estate to confirm every reference was handled with accuracy and respect before it reached a guest's table.

Atmosphere

The dining room's sound became part of the concept as well, with a Studio 54 era playlist curated to place guests inside the same cultural moment the exhibition traced, disco and downtown New York as a companion to the paintings one floor below.

Results

The concept drew press attention beyond Chicago's dining press alone, extending the exhibition's audience to guests who came for the meal and discovered, or rediscovered, the art. Internally, the program is credited with drawing a noticeably younger dining audience into the museum than Terzo Piano typically sees, evidence that a culinary program built on real research can extend an institution's reach rather than simply decorate its calendar.

A campaign image, made for a restaurant, selected by its own maker as the best photograph he took that year.

The Channel, as Published

Twenty-five posts ran across the length of the Warhol menu, each carrying its original caption, its date, and its photographer credit, published on the restaurant's channel at @terzopianochicago. Campaign photography by Neil John Burger unless otherwise credited in the post. The dishes below link to their own photograph in that archive.

Press Coverage

The concept was covered by outlets across Chicago's food and culture press ahead of and during the exhibition's run.

Michelangelo: Mind of the Master ran at the Cleveland Museum of Art from 22 September 2019 to 5 January 2020 before traveling to the J. Paul Getty Museum. Organized by Cleveland and the Getty in conjunction with the Teylers Museum in Haarlem, it brought a group of Michelangelo drawings to the United States for the first time, working sketches for the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the Medici Chapel tombs, and the dome of Saint Peter's Basilica. Emily J. Peters, the museum's curator of prints and drawings, organized the Cleveland presentation.

The stakes of a show like that are easy to understate. Michelangelo burned much of his own work near the end of his life; of the many thousands of sheets he is thought to have drawn, only around six hundred survive. What was hanging in Cleveland was not a selection from an abundance. It was most of what is left.

Provenance, Twice Over

There is a detail here almost too neat to be true. The centerpiece of the exhibition was a group of drawings with an illustrious provenance, held by the Teylers Museum since 1790 and before that in the collection of Queen Christina of Sweden. The restaurant answering the exhibition is called Provenance, named for the same word and the same idea: where a thing came from and whose hands it passed through, applied to a museum's objects and to a kitchen's ingredients at once. The museum takes that seriously enough to state it plainly, that the name comes from the French provenir, to come from, and that the dining program marries locally sourced food to the lineages of the roughly forty-five thousand objects in the collection.

Chef Douglas Katz and the Grocery List

Provenance, Provenance Café, and Catering by Provenance run on a partnership between the museum, Bon Appétit Management Company, and Chef Douglas Katz, who has led the culinary team there since the concept opened in 2012 and who is separately the owner and executive chef of fire food and drink in Shaker Square. Exhibition-inspired prix fixe menus are the standing format at the restaurant rather than an occasional gesture, and Katz has described drawing on the art itself and on the artifacts around it.

For Michelangelo he went to an unlikely document: the artist's own grocery list, a sheet on which he sketched the items he wanted, bread, herrings, wine, so that a servant who could not read would know what to buy. It is a drawing by one of the greatest draftsmen in history, made for the most ordinary purpose imaginable. Katz built the prix fixe out of it, a menu of Renaissance intrigue assembled from a shopping errand, and in doing so put visitors in contact with the man rather than the monument.

That is the whole interpretive argument in one dish. A visitor standing in front of a study for the Sistine ceiling is looking at genius. A visitor eating from the grocery list is looking at a person who had to eat.

The menu drew trade press: Foodservice Director on the grocery list prix fixe · News 5 Cleveland

A visitor standing in front of a study for the Sistine ceiling is looking at genius. A visitor eating from the grocery list is looking at a person who had to eat.

Communicating a Menu Built on a Document

A menu like that only works if the story behind it travels. The dish itself explains nothing; the sheet it came from is not on every wall, and the joke, that a Renaissance master wrote a list of herrings, lands only if someone tells it. The communications work was to carry that document into the announcement, into the press conversation, and into the room, so that a guest arrived already knowing why bread and wine were on the plate. Kickoff events introducing a new exhibition menu do the same job in person, putting the kitchen in front of guests to explain where a dish came from before anyone tastes it.

The Exhibition, Programmed Around

The dining program did not run alone. The museum built an unusually complete calendar around the drawings: a Pop-Up Drawing Lounge open on Tuesdays and Sundays through the run, curator talks and a lecture on Michelangelo's figures, and a MIX evening on 4 October devoted to the exhibition, with figure drawing, gallery talks, guest artist displays, and a DJ set in the atrium. The museum's whole argument, that a person can enter this collection from any direction, was being made through drawing pencils, a dance floor, and a menu simultaneously.

The holiday extension of that calendar, which kept the galleries open into the evening and put a bar in the atrium, is treated separately in case study XIII.

Manet and Modern Beauty ran at the Art Institute of Chicago from 26 May to 8 September 2019, the museum's first exhibition devoted entirely to Édouard Manet in more than fifty years. Co-organized with the J. Paul Getty Museum, it gathered more than ninety paintings, pastels, watercolors, and works on paper from the artist's final years, and it was the first exhibition anywhere to take that period as its whole subject. Gloria Groom, the museum's chair of European Painting and Sculpture, framed the curatorial ambition as adding the missing piece to a complete understanding of an artist everyone assumes they already know.

Terzo Piano sat three floors above it in Renzo Piano's Modern Wing, and the restaurant answered the exhibition the same way it would answer Warhol five months later: with a menu built from the work rather than draped over it.

The Opposite Register

The two exhibitions of 2019 could not have asked for more different things. Warhol demanded flat color, repetition, and the language of the supermarket, and the menu answered with a soup can rebuilt as a cocktail and a TV dinner on a school tray. Manet asked for the palette and surface of late nineteenth-century Paris: pastel rather than screenprint, the half-finished edge rather than the hard one, and beauty pursued without apology. The menu and the terrace pairings moved accordingly, toward lighter construction, French technique, and the produce of a Chicago summer, which is the season the exhibition actually occupied.

Running two exhibition menus in a single year, in two entirely different visual languages, is what turns an idea into a program. One translation is a clever season. Two, in registers that share nothing, is a method the museum can rely on.

What the Exhibition Gave a Kitchen

Manet's late work is unusually generous to a restaurant, because so much of it is already about the table and the garden. The exhibition included the artist's rarely seen illustrated letters to friends, small notes finished with exquisitely observed fruits and flowers, alongside his late still lifes and garden pictures. A painter spending his last years on a plum, a bunch of asparagus, a vase of roses, and the fashionable women who sat near them is a painter already working in a kitchen's vocabulary.

The exhibition's two great portraits, Jeanne (Spring) and Autumn (Méry Laurent), were the only completed works in a project to portray the seasons through stylishly dressed women, which gave the culinary side an organizing idea that needed no explaining: a menu built on seasonality, answering an artist who had been building on seasonality himself.

The Communications Judgment

The risk with an Impressionist blockbuster is that everything around it turns decorative. A menu of pretty plates named after pretty paintings would have been easy, well received, and empty. The discipline was the same one the Warhol menu required and the same one the galleries live by: every reference had to be defensible, drawn from a specific work or a documented fact about the artist, and legible to a guest who had just walked out of the exhibition with the paintings still in front of them.

That is what separates interpretation from theming. A guest who had not read a wall label still met the exhibition at the table, and a guest who had read every one of them found nothing at the table that contradicted it.

Bon Appétit Management Company operates the Cleveland Museum of Art's dining in three parts: Provenance, the restaurant; Provenance Café; and Catering by Provenance, which handles the museum's events. The name is not incidental. Provenance is the term a museum uses for the documented history of an object, where it came from and whose hands it passed through, and a restaurant inside a museum taking that name is making a claim about sourcing that it then has to keep.

The Institution's Own Argument

Cleveland is unusual among major museums in how publicly it has committed to the problem of intimidation. Since 2012, first as Gallery One and later as ArtLens Gallery, it has built a thirteen-thousand-square-foot space where gesture-sensing projections, eye-tracking, and facial recognition replace touchscreens entirely, designed explicitly to welcome visitors who do not think of themselves as museum people. The museum's position is that access is not a marketing objective but a mission obligation, and the dining program sits inside that position rather than beside it.

A Program, Not a Series of Menus

Across the 2018 to 2020 exhibition run, from Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Mirrors and Georgia O'Keeffe: Living Modern through Shinto: Discovery of the Divine in Japanese Art and Cai Guo-Qiang's Cuyahoga River Lightning, the pattern held: each major exhibition brought a new prix fixe pairing local and seasonal ingredients with the geography and period of the work on view. Done once, that is a gimmick. Done for every exhibition across three years, it becomes an interpretive layer the museum can rely on, and the discipline it demands is the same one the galleries live by, which is that the reference has to be right.

MIX is the Cleveland Museum of Art's monthly evening for an adults-only audience: art, music, and cocktails in the Ames Family Atrium, with the galleries open and a different theme every month. Catering by Provenance is the hospitality engine underneath those nights, and communications for the dining side meant treating a bar in an atrium as part of the museum's access argument rather than as an amenity.

Music as an Entrance

The museum's own performing arts leadership has described the intent plainly: the atrium is unlike any other event space, the galleries stay open, and an eclectic series of musical performances creates an atmosphere that lets people engage with art differently. Music, in that framing, is an access point for people who would not otherwise think of coming to a museum.

The programming carries that seriously rather than decoratively. Individual MIX evenings have been built around the opening of a fashion exhibition, around fifty years of hip-hop with a lineup of seven DJs, around Black History Month and Cleveland's own funk and soul lineage, and around an artist's large-scale installation standing in the atrium itself. In parallel, the museum's Chamber Music in the Atrium series brings Cleveland Institute of Music conservatory players into the same room, with dinner from Provenance Café at tables on the floor. The same space carries a string quartet on one night and a DJ set on another, which is a programming range most institutions never attempt.

Where Technology Comes In

The museum has spent more than a decade arguing that digital tools can deepen a relationship with a collection rather than distract from it. ArtLens, launched in 2012 as Gallery One, replaced touchscreens with gesture-sensing projections, eye tracking, and facial recognition that respond to a visitor's body as they approach. An independent evaluation in 2018 found that visitors who began in ArtLens stayed thirty minutes to an hour longer in the museum than those who did not.

When the gallery relaunched as ArtLens Gallery, the museum introduced it through a MIX evening, MIX: Interact, rather than through a press preview. Attendees were the first public audience inside the space, and the atrium carried a large screen mirroring the gallery's Beacon, pulling visitor-made artwork and poses onto the wall live as the evening ran. The museum's chief information officer framed the night as the first opportunity to experience the space, which tells you how seriously the institution takes the format: the launch of its flagship technology went to a party rather than to the press.

What the Numbers Show

The format's scale is on the public record. By 2016 the museum reported MIX drawing around eighteen thousand guests a year across its monthly evenings, and museum staff have described a full MIX filling the Ames Family Atrium with as many as two thousand people in a night. Over the same period the museum's share of on-site adult visitors aged thirty-four and under grew from twenty-four percent to thirty-one percent, without losing the older core audience, which is the precise outcome the format was built to produce. The series' launch year tells the same story from the other end: in the fiscal year MIX began alongside the new atrium, museum attendance reached 501,314, a thirty-nine percent increase and the highest in over a decade, with the museum naming MIX among the drivers.

The audience-share and annual figures are the museum's own, reported through Crain's Cleveland Business in 2016 and the museum's press office. No figure here isolates the dining program's contribution from the rest of the evening.

The Communications Argument

The three strands are the same argument made three ways. Gesture-sensing interactives, a DJ in the atrium, and a bar that turns a late opening into an evening all exist because the museum treats access as a mission obligation rather than a marketing objective. Communicating the dining and hospitality side meant refusing to let any of it read as an amenity bolted onto the galleries, and insisting instead that the evening, the technology, and the drink in someone's hand were all part of how the collection reaches people who do not yet think of themselves as museum people.

Bon Appétit Management Company has served as Emory University's campus dining partner since 2015, operating cafes across the Atlanta campus and Oxford College. Valencia's work with the account centered on the partnership's most public-facing initiatives between 2016 and 2019: seasonal education, food ethics programming, and the connective tissue between dining and Emory's health science schools.

The Transition

Bon Appétit took over Emory's dining operations on 1 June 2015, which is a harder communications problem than it sounds. A campus-wide vendor change is scrutinized by students, parents, faculty, and staff simultaneously, each group with different standing to object, and the incoming operator inherits every complaint about the outgoing one. The transition was anchored to the university's own ambition of sourcing seventy-five percent of its food locally or sustainably, so the argument to campus was never that the food would be better but that the supply chain would be answerable.

Operationally that meant scratch cooking across the Atlanta and Oxford campuses and the removal of MSG and trans fats from the system. Communicating a sourcing standard is unlike communicating a menu: the claim is about things a diner cannot see, which makes it a trust argument rather than a taste one.

Partners and Supply Chain

From 2016, The Common Market Southeast became the logistical pipeline carrying produce from small Southern family farms into Emory's kitchens, which turned an abstract sourcing goal into a set of named growers. The work ran alongside Emory's Office of Sustainability Initiatives on student outreach, the Sustainable Food Fair, and the university's landfill diversion targets.

On food recovery, back-of-house waste measurement was paired with a student-led Swipe Share program and a partnership with the Food Recovery Network, routing kitchen surplus to Atlanta shelters and pantries. Food insecurity on a wealthy campus is a subject institutions handle badly, usually by not naming it, and the communications judgment was to treat students as capable of hearing that both things were true at once.

Eat the Seasons

Launched in fall 2016, Eat the Seasons was an educational campaign built around a simple sticker system, tagging menus and signage across campus cafes by season so students could see at a glance what was actually in growing season in Georgia, and why. The campaign paired with biannual chef demonstrations run in partnership with Slow Food Emory, using organic produce from the university's own Oxford Farm.

Food Ethics on Campus: The WASTED! Screening

On January 24, 2019, Emory hosted a free public program built around a screening of WASTED! The Story of Food Waste, narrated by Anthony Bourdain. The evening opened with a food tasting from Atlanta restaurants Miller Union and Wrecking Bar, followed by the film and a live panel discussion, organized through the Emory Center for Ethics' Reel Ruminations series in partnership with Slow Food Atlanta. The program tied directly into Bon Appétit's campus food recovery work with the student-run Slow Food Emory chapter, which channels surplus dining hall food to students facing food insecurity.

Bridging the Classroom, the Clinic, and the Kitchen

The partnership's reach extended well past general dining. At the Rollins School of Public Health, Bon Appétit operates the Rollins Café directly on-site. In a 2019 Emory course connecting nutrition science to hands-on cooking, students, including those headed toward medicine, public health, and policy, worked alongside Emory Dining and Bon Appétit staff through a series of cooking sessions, culminating in a student-run community health showcase where they presented their own menus to guests from across the university.

Bon Appétit's Food and Nutrition team also worked alongside Emory University Hospital's own Food and Nutrition Services on cross-campus wellness programming, including farmers market tastings tied to the health system's Better Choices initiative. Emory's hospitals run their own in-house dining operations rather than contracting Bon Appétit directly, so this work sat at the collaboration point between the two, not inside a single food service contract.

What the Numbers Show

The partnership's sustainability claims were measured, not asserted. Emory Dining committed to sourcing at least fifty percent local or sustainable food by 2016, defining local as Georgia and the eight-state Southeast, and Bon Appétit's in-house purchase tracking program logged every food purchase across residential dining, catering, and retail to report against that standard through Emory's public AASHE STARS filings. From November 2015 the cafés ran biannual Weigh the Waste campaigns measuring both kitchen and guest plate waste. The campus market told its own story: from fall 2015 onward, students spent more than $800,000 of their meal plans at the Emory Farmers Market, which the university reads as the community voting for local food with its own accounts.

The partnership's sustainability claims were measured, not asserted.

Plant-Forward Dining & PETA Recognition

Plant-forward dining ran through the same period as a standing commitment rather than a gesture: the residential dining hall carried a one hundred percent vegan station, Cox Hall promoted Meatless Mondays weekly, and vegan and vegetarian items were flagged across every daily menu. That work earned outside notice, with Emory Dining placed on PETA's list of top vegan-friendly colleges, the recognition tracked through peta2's national Vegan Report Card, which grades the vegan-friendliness of dining programs at four-year institutions across the country.

Sustainability Recognition

Across this period, Emory maintained a Gold rating from the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) through its STARS reporting system, a status it has held continuously since 2011, with sustainable dining consistently cited as a full-scoring category. Emory's dining program has also been a recurring factor in the university's placement in The Princeton Review's Guide to Green Colleges.

Fair Trade Sourcing

Fair Trade advocacy sits at the center of her own values, and it was one of the pillars she led communications around most closely on this account. Bon Appétit's 2015 company-wide commitment to serve 100 percent Fair Trade Certified hot tea, made in partnership with Numi Organic Tea, carried through to Emory's dining halls and catering program, extending the university's broader ethical sourcing standards for coffee, tea, and sugar campus-wide, from the residential dining commons through to Emory's on-campus Starbucks locations. Communicating that standard to students, parents, and the broader Emory community, and explaining what Fair Trade certification actually protects for the farmers and workers behind it, was central to how she framed the partnership's ethical sourcing story.

Kaldi's Coffee & Heritage Chef's Tables

She also worked with Kaldi's Coffee on student-facing programming, and led creative direction and photography for a recurring Chef's Table series, dinners built around the heritage and culinary traditions of a different country each time, developed in collaboration with Emory Dining's chefs.

Chef's Tables & Student Dining Traditions

Beyond the headline campaigns, the partnership ran on a steady rhythm of smaller, recurring dining traditions that kept students engaged with where their food came from.

Recipes from Home is the longest-running of these: launched in 2010, the program invites incoming freshmen's parents to submit family recipes, which Emory Dining's executive chefs review for fit with residential dining, then prepare for students to sample and vote on. Winning dishes are published in a "Recipes from Home" digital cookbook and folded into the regular dining rotation, a tradition Emory Dining has carried forward in the years since.

The Eat Local Challenge is Bon Appétit's company-wide annual tradition, running for close to two decades, in which chefs build a full day's menu entirely from local ingredients. At Emory, that meant menus built around produce from the university's own Oxford College Organic Farm, served at interactive tasting stations rather than a standard line.

A rotating Chef's Table, interactive chef-led stations where the executive chef curates a seasonal, showcase menu apart from the standard lines, is a Bon Appétit fixture across Emory's dining halls, a format the university's own campus reporting still points to as a highlight of the dining experience.

Recognition

She led the account's communications and marketing through this era, beginning as Communications and Marketing Manager for the Emory partnership and advancing to Communications and Marketing Director. Under that leadership, Kellie Piper, Regional Vice President overseeing the Emory account, and the Emory Dining team were recognized with a Be-A-Star Award, Compass Group's internal honor for accounts and leaders who deliver business excellence, community engagement, and hospitality standards above the bar, celebrated annually at the company's national gala.

Grant Jones is a musician, contemplative, and clinical psychology researcher at Harvard University whose work sits at the intersection of music, meditation, and mental health. Valencia served as public relations lead for the program through AMW Group, building the thought leadership platform that carried the research beyond the academy.

The Program

Known as healing attempt, the program is a digital, music-based mindfulness intervention developed for Black Americans experiencing race-based anxiety, and designed specifically for people with little or no prior meditation experience. It was funded in part by a Mind & Life Institute Varela Grant and the Harvard Culture Lab Innovation Fund, and co-mentored by Grammy-winning Harvard professor Esperanza Spalding. Findings were published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research and JMIR Formative Research in 2023.

The intervention is built on the lineages of Black gospel, soul, and diasporic music, treating contemplative practice not as an import but as something these traditions have carried for generations. That framing is the substance of the work, not a description of it, and it shaped every decision about how the program was communicated.

The Communications Problem

Academic research carries a particular difficulty: the findings matter most to the communities studied, and those communities do not read peer-reviewed journals. The task was to carry the work into cultural and mainstream press without flattening either the science or the musical lineage it was built on, and without letting a program about healing be covered as a novelty.

Attribution

The research, the grants, and the Harvard appointments described here belong to Grant Jones and his collaborators. Valencia's role was public relations lead for the program, engaged through AMW Group.

Valencia served as Public Relations Manager for Bon Appétit's culinary program at Porsche Experience Center Atlanta (PECA), home to Restaurant 356, through the 2018 to 2020 window, and supported culinary public relations for Taycan launch activity at Porsche Experience Center Los Angeles (PECLA), home to Restaurant 917, into early 2020.

Co-Branded Communications

The account's defining constraint was that two premium brands shared every asset. Public relations ran in direct coordination with Porsche Cars North America's corporate communications team, which meant a dual review on every release, social post, photograph, and influencer package: Bon Appétit's hospitality standards on one side, Porsche's global corporate identity guidelines on the other. Co-branded work fails in the gap between two approval chains, and the discipline is less about creative than about knowing whose guideline governs which element before anyone drafts anything.

It also meant pitching two media sectors that rarely overlap. Culinary and restaurant press covered the kitchens; automotive, travel, and luxury lifestyle press covered the experience centers as destinations. The same program had to read as a serious restaurant to one audience and as an extension of the marque to the other.

Super Bowl LIII

In February 2019 the Super Bowl came to Mercedes-Benz Stadium, a short drive from the Porsche Experience Center Atlanta, and the campus became a hospitality venue for corporate guests and visiting executives across the week. For the culinary side that meant elevated game-week programming rather than standard game-day service, run at volume, on a compressed schedule, under heightened security and media interest.

Restaurant 356, Atlanta

Restaurant 356 sits inside PECA, Porsche's $100 million North American headquarters and experience center, opened in 2015, with panoramic views of the 1.6-mile driver development track on one side and Hartsfield-Jackson's Runway 826 on the other. During this era the kitchen was led by Executive Chef Robbie Pacheco, building a seasonal menu on ingredients sourced from local farmers, foragers, and artisans, in keeping with Bon Appétit's farm-to-table standard. The property's 13,000 square feet of flexible event space also made 356 a regular venue for executive and corporate hospitality tied to Porsche's North American operations.

Track-Side Programming

Both restaurants sit behind floor-to-ceiling glass over the handling circuits, which made the room itself the product. Private dining and corporate blocks were timed around track schedules so that a group moved between the circuit and the table without a gap. Packages bundling a driving experience with lunch reached an audience the restaurants would not otherwise have had: weekend visitors and local diners who came for the track and discovered a kitchen.

The menu carried Stuttgart deliberately. The wine list leaned on German Rieslings and European bottles, and a developed non-alcoholic list existed because a meaningful share of guests were heading onto a driver development track afterwards, which is a hospitality constraint most restaurants never have to design around.

Restaurant 917, Los Angeles

Restaurant 917 sits on the second level of PECLA, a 53-acre facility that opened in November 2016, named for the Porsche 917 that won Le Mans overall in 1970 and 1971. The kitchen there is Bon Appétit-operated as well, built around ingredient-driven, seasonal Southern California cuisine.

A Sustainability Story for an Electric Car

Porsche unveiled the Taycan, its first fully electric sports car, on September 4, 2019, in a world premiere held simultaneously across three continents, framed explicitly around the idea of a sustainable future: a leather-free interior option, recycled interior materials, and premiere locations chosen to represent hydro, solar, and wind power. That same narrative was the throughline of the culinary public relations work at both properties: farm-to-table sourcing, zero-waste kitchen technique, and locally foraged ingredients as the edible counterpart to the car's sustainable engineering story, translating the Taycan's "sustainable future" positioning onto the plate for the media, VIPs, and early customers who came through both experience centers.

The Premiere Circuit

The Taycan's US premiere followed at the LA Auto Show in November 2019, with regional dealer and customer launch activity at both experience centers continuing into early 2020, up until the operational pivot brought on by the pandemic that March.

The US premiere placed the new Taycan 4S at center stage of the Porsche stand at the Los Angeles Convention Center on November 20, 2019, alongside the Turbo and Turbo S, with the 99X Electric, Porsche's first all-electric racing car, shown in parallel with the marque's Formula E debut that same week.

The Restaurants' Part

The experience centers are where Porsche hands a car to its owner, and the restaurants sit inside that ritual by design. A New Vehicle Delivery at the Atlanta campus runs through a tour, an in-depth vehicle orientation, ninety minutes on the driver development track, and lunch at Restaurant 356, a format that began in Atlanta and was extended to the Los Angeles campus in 2018. For the first Taycan owners taking delivery through the experience centers, the car's sustainable-future story reached them across a table as well as from behind a wheel, told through the sourcing on the plate rather than a placard beside it.

Restaurant 356 had carried that argument since its opening, built on locally sourced organic ingredients as a deliberate expression of the brand, which is what made the kitchen a credible narrator for the Taycan rather than a caterer adjacent to it.

Speechwriting

Through the launch period Valencia also served as a speechwriter, drafting executive remarks for the hospitality program's launch and delivery events, the spoken counterpart to the story the menus were telling.

The Positioning, Carried Into Infrastructure

In the years since, the Atlanta campus has installed a solar array and microgrid that charges its fleet of all-electric Taycans, the same story the launch told on the plate, later poured into the ground.

Terzo Piano occupied the third floor of Renzo Piano's Modern Wing at the Art Institute of Chicago, its terrace looking across Millennium Park and the Bluhm Family Terrace, reachable from the street or over the Nichols Bridgeway without paying museum admission. That last detail is the whole strategic problem in one sentence: the restaurant could be entered by anyone, which meant it could reach people the galleries never would, and it had to earn them.

Valencia handled public relations and social media creative direction for the ongoing events calendar, the recurring program through which a museum restaurant builds a following of its own. The work ran on three tracks at once: the exhibitions the museum was showing, the atmosphere that made an evening feel like an occasion, and the channel that carried both to an audience.

The Exhibitions

The exhibition menus are the part people remember, but they only worked because the calendar around them had already taught an audience that this kitchen answered the galleries. Heritage months and cultural observances were built around the culinary traditions they actually mark rather than around a graphic treatment, Mexican Heritage Month among them. Menu launches were timed to two calendars at once, the kitchen's seasons and the museum's exhibition schedule, so that a new menu arrived when there was a reason for it to arrive.

The Room

Atmosphere was programmed, not assumed. Chef-driven dinners put the kitchen team in front of the room, sommelier pairings and tastings were led from the floor, and the sound in the dining room was curated to the moment the museum was presenting, most visibly the Studio 54 era playlist that ran through the Warhol menu and placed guests inside the same cultural moment the retrospective traced. A room with the right music in it stops being a restaurant inside a museum and becomes a destination on a Thursday night.

The Channel

The channel was the third leg, and it is where the program was actually built. Social media creative direction meant deciding what each event looked like before it existed: the visual direction of the campaign photography, the sequence in which a menu was revealed, the writing that connected a plate back to the work it came from, and the timing that put a post in front of an audience while a ticket was still available. Campaign photography by Chicago photographer Neil John Burger gave the channel a consistent visual language, and the published archive at @terzopianochicago is the record of it, several hundred posts carrying their original captions, dates, and photographer credits.

Announcements, press strategy, and audience targeting ran off that same channel. A ticketed chef's dinner does not fill because a museum has visitors; it fills because someone decided, weeks earlier, who it was for and where they would see it.

The Recurring Calendar

• Heritage Programming

  Cultural heritage months and observances built around the culinary traditions they mark, including Mexican Heritage Month

• Menu Launches

  Debut events for new and seasonal menus, timed to the kitchen's calendar and the museum's exhibition schedule

• Seasonal Events

  Programming tied to the produce and the moment, carrying the same seasonal logic the kitchen worked from

• Chef-Driven Dinners

  Ticketed dinners built around the kitchen team and their cooking

• Sommelier Pairings and Tastings

  Wine pairing dinners and tasting events led from the floor

• Holiday Events

  Calendar occasions including the restaurant's Father's Day programming

Why a Calendar Matters

A single exhibition menu is a moment. A calendar is an institution. The events program is what let the restaurant carry a following through the gaps between blockbusters, and it is the reason the Warhol and Manet menus landed on an audience that was already paying attention rather than on an empty room. It also gave the museum something it could not buy: a reason for a Chicagoan to return in a month when nothing new had opened upstairs.

Chef Carolina Diaz's own story runs alongside the Warhol menu's. Diaz joined Terzo Piano as chef di cucina in May 2016 under Chef Tony Mantuano, the James Beard Award winner whose restaurant group ran the kitchen, having come up through Chicago kitchens including Red Light, Urban Belly, and Filini Bar. In May 2018, she was crowned U.S. Master of Pasta at a Barilla-hosted cook-off filmed at CBS Studios' Culinary Kitchen in Chicago, beating three other American chefs in front of a judging panel that included Barilla's own executive chef. That October, she represented the United States at Barilla's World Pasta Championship in Milan, competing against chefs from 17 countries, and won with a Spaghetti al Pomodoro built on nothing more than tomato, garlic, olive oil, and technique, becoming the first woman, and the first Latina, to win the title.

Valencia traveled to Milan for the championship. She documented the competition as it happened and ran communications around it, which in practice meant building the story before the result was known, then carrying it to media and public audiences once it was. Competition communications are unlike campaign work in one respect: there is no way to know in advance whether the story ends in a win, and the preparation has to hold either way. Warhol's menu was a translation of art onto a plate; Milan was the reverse, a plate carried onto an international stage, and both are the same discipline.

The win carried weight on several fronts at once: for a woman claiming a title in a competition still dominated by men, for an American chef winning on Italy's own terms with Italy's own dish, and for Bon Appétit Management Company and Terzo Piano, whose name traveled to Milan alongside hers. It was also, in its own way, a case for simplicity: a dish built from four honest ingredients beat out competitors from seventeen countries, a reminder that pasta's excellence rests on technique and restraint rather than complexity, the same instinct that shaped the Warhol menu itself.

Press Coverage

Holidays at the CMA ran on three Saturdays: 30 November and 28 December 2019, and 4 January 2020. The Cleveland Museum of Art normally closes at five on a Saturday. On those three nights Michelangelo: Mind of the Master and Tiffany in Bloom: Stained Glass Lamps of Louis Comfort Tiffany stayed open until eight, the permanent collection galleries held their usual five o'clock close, and the museum store stayed open late alongside them. Tickets and dinner reservations were sold until seven.

The Problem a Late Opening Solves

A museum's hardest audience is not the one that will not come. It is the one that means to come and never gets there. Between September and January, a person in Cleveland who intended to see the Michelangelo drawings had a finite number of free Saturday afternoons, and December took most of them. Extending three of those Saturdays by three hours does not add a new audience. It removes the reason the existing one keeps postponing, and it does that at the exact point in a run when postponing turns into missing it altogether.

That timing is the whole design. The Michelangelo exhibition closed on 5 January 2020. The last of the three late nights fell on 4 January, the final full day of the run.

A Bar Under the Glass Roof

The Ames Family Atrium is the museum's glass-roofed central court and the largest free interior public space in Cleveland. For the three nights it carried a pop-up bar built around Tiffany, with cocktails themed to both exhibitions, a selection of Italian wines beside the Renaissance drawings, and made-to-order drinks and beer for everyone else. Provenance served the Michelangelo grocery list prix fixe by reservation on the same evenings.

A pop-up bar is a small thing on paper. In practice it is what converts a late opening from an inconvenience into an evening, and an evening is what a visitor tells someone else about. An extra three hours with nothing in them is a logistics change. An extra three hours with a drink, a table, and a room worth standing in is a plan.

An extra three hours with nothing in them is a logistics change. An extra three hours with a drink, a table, and a room worth standing in is a plan.

Two Exhibitions, One Evening

Tiffany in Bloom was free and open into June, twenty illuminated stained glass lamps and the Hinds House window of about 1900, drawn largely from the bequest of the Cleveland collector Charles Maurer and shown together for the first time. Mind of the Master was ticketed, finite, and about to close.

Pairing them was the sharper judgment in the program. A free show of lit glass in December is an easy yes for someone who has not decided whether to spend fifteen dollars on Renaissance drawings, and it puts that person inside the building with a ticket desk in front of them. The bar sat between the two, themed to both, which meant the evening read as one occasion rather than two errands.

What the Numbers Show

Michelangelo: Mind of the Master ran from 22 September 2019 to 5 January 2020 and closed having drawn an audience in excess of seventy-five thousand, reported by the museum in its final grant report to the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. The Pop-Up Drawing Lounge that ran alongside it served more than two thousand people across the run.

The museum went into that season off its strongest year on record. In the fiscal year ending June 2019 the CMA counted 864,754 visitors, the highest in its history, and served more than a million people once off-site programming was included. Holidays at the CMA was not built to rescue a struggling show. It was built to close a strong one at full stride, which is a different and less forgiving brief: the audience is already there, and the only thing left to win is the part of it that has not gotten around to coming.

Attendance for the three individual evenings has not been published separately, and no figure here should be read as attributable to the holiday program alone.

Why It Belongs in a Communications Record

Nothing in this program required new art, new galleries, or new money. It required a decision to stay open, a bar, a menu, and the work of telling people in time for it to matter. Announced too late and three extra hours are a press release nobody acts on. That is the ordinary shape of institutional audience building: the asset is already in the building, and the discipline is making the public aware of it while the window is still open.

Sources

Museum announcement, clevelandart.org · Attendance, kressfoundation.org · Record year, clevelandart.org

Bellabeat is a Silicon Valley wellness company founded in 2014 by Urška Sršen and Sandro Mur, a Y Combinator graduate best known for smart jewelry that made a health tracker something a woman would actually wear. Its Ivy tracker and Wellness Coach app moved the company toward a harder ambition: cycle-synced wellness, reading a woman's biometric data against the phases of her menstrual cycle and tailoring guidance on diet, movement, and mindfulness to each one. Valencia directed the account at AMW Group, with responsibility for strategy, media placement, and the strategic consulting behind the brand's American growth.

The Brief

The problem was not the product. Bellabeat had revenue, a differentiated device, and a category, women's health technology, that American media was beginning to take seriously. What it did not have was standing in the American conversation: minimal United States press, low awareness of what the new app actually did, and no presence in the rooms where wellness coverage gets decided. A brand can be significant and invisible at the same time, and the work was to close the distance between the two.

The Strategy

The approach ran on a principle the rest of this site applies to institutions: borrow no credibility you cannot survive being checked on. Rather than buying reach through scattered placements, the strategy paired the brand with talent whose association would be believed, put the product in a room whose guest list was itself a media strategy, and used the coverage from each moment as the platform for the next.

Two Moments, in Order

The first was the talent partnership. In April 2022, Olivia Culpo, model, actress, and entrepreneur, announced the Ivy as her tracker of choice in a video to her audience, telling them she was obsessed with it and walking through what it measured, from cycle to heart rate to stress to hydration. The announcement was carried on the wire and picked up internationally, giving the brand its first sustained American celebrity association.

The second built on the first. In the summer of 2023, Bellabeat marked the season with a Wellness Summer Power dinner at Nobu in Malibu, hosted by Culpo alongside Isabel Alysa Vita, founder of Dolce Glow. The room was the point: the Culpo sisters of HBO Max's The Culpo Sisters, James Charles, Pia Mia, Montana Tucker, fitness entrepreneur Sarah Stage, a Condé Nast director, and WWD's beauty reporter, each guest either a channel to an audience or a decision-maker in wellness coverage, and most of them both. Guests left with the Ivy in hand, which meant the product went home with the exact people whose endorsement the strategy was built to earn.

What the Coverage Shows

The dinner was covered by Daily Front Row and Flaunt, the announcement by the wire and international fashion press, and the company's own corporate history now records the Malibu evening as a milestone. Across the campaign window, the agency's case reporting recorded thirteen feature articles in four months, a media footprint the brand had never previously held in the United States, alongside a consulting engagement that left Bellabeat with a defined strategy for the North American market.

Selected coverage is linked below; the placements cited are drawn from the agency's case record and are not reproduced here in full.

Sources

Daily Front Row, on the Nobu Malibu dinner · Flaunt, on the evening and its guest list · PRNewswire, the April 2022 Culpo announcement

Valencia's work with UNICEF USA centered on the Atlanta chapter's federal appropriations and advocacy program, alongside the local communications supporting the chapter's galas and cultural programming, primarily across 2015 to 2020.

Government Relations & Policy Advocacy

Bipartisan appropriations work culminated in late 2019, when Congress authorized $134 million in core resources for UNICEF for fiscal year 2020, the U.S. government's highest contribution to UNICEF at that point, a $1.5 million increase and the first rise in the U.S. contribution in four years. That same funding package doubled USAID's maternal and neonatal tetanus (MNT) funding to $2 million. During annual UNICEF Advocacy Week, the Atlanta chapter met with Georgia's congressional delegation on Capitol Hill to advance a legislative slate that included the Global Child Thrive Act, which directed USAID to build early childhood development into its global health programming, the Keeping Girls in School Act, and the Protecting Girls' Access to Education in Vulnerable Settings Act, which ultimately passed into law.

The REACH Act & Senator Isakson

A multi-year priority across this period was the Reach Every Mother and Child (REACH) Act, bipartisan legislation directing USAID to adopt a five-year strategy and a dedicated Maternal and Child Survival Coordinator focused on ending preventable maternal, newborn, and child deaths globally, including expanded access to low-cost interventions like Kangaroo Care for newborns. Georgia's own Senator Johnny Isakson was an original cosponsor of the bill in both the 115th and 116th Congress, and the chapter's Capitol Hill advocacy helped keep his office engaged on the issue. In January 2020, the Senate unanimously passed a related global nutrition resolution that Isakson had also cosponsored, recognizing continued U.S. leadership in reducing maternal and child malnutrition worldwide.

Global Emergency Response Communications

From 2017 to 2019, local communications tracked two emergencies in parallel: the Rohingya crisis in Bangladesh, where messaging centered on UNICEF's emergency water systems, learning centers, and vaccination clinics built for families who had fled violence in Myanmar into the camps at Cox's Bazar, and early childhood development programming in Rwanda, where the focus was on national family care hubs, home-visit health tracking, and reducing chronic child stunting.

Cultural Programming

In June 2018, the Atlanta chapter partnered with the National Center for Civil and Human Rights to bring photographer and filmmaker Thomas Nybo's photo essay, Attacks Against Rohingya, to Atlanta. Nybo's images of families fleeing Myanmar into the camps at Cox's Bazar anchored a public conversation at the Center and became a focal point for the chapter's emergency fundraising around the crisis.

Galas & Philanthropic Engagement

The Atlanta chapter's signature galas paired star power with significant fundraising. In March 2017, "An Evening for Children First" at The Foundry at Puritan Mill presented actor Laurence Fishburne, a UNICEF Ambassador since 1996, with the Global Philanthropist Award; the evening drew more than 300 guests and raised more than $690,000 for UNICEF's emergency field funds. In April 2019, the chapter's annual gala, held at the same venue, featured Emma Kathleen Hepburn Ferrer, granddaughter of the late UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador Audrey Hepburn, who spoke on her grandmother's legacy and helped drive the evening's philanthropic giving.

Press Coverage

Both galas and the Nybo exhibition drew local and national press attention.