Director, Anna Tasca Lanza Cooking School | Sicily, Italy

Fabrizia Lanza is a storyteller, educator, and cultural curator who invites people to rethink their relationship with food starting from the ground up. As the director of the Anna Tasca Lanza Cooking School, she creates spaces where flavor becomes a lens for exploring culture, agriculture, memory, and change. Born in Palermo in 1961 into a family with deep agricultural roots, Fabrizia grew up surrounded by the rhythms of rural Sicily: wheat fields, olive groves, and vineyards stretching across her family’s 200-year-old estate. Though her early path led her to art history and museum curation, it was the textures and tastes of home that eventually called her back to Sicily. 

In 2006, Fabrizia returned to Sicily to join her mother, Anna Tasca Lanza, in running the cooking school founded in 1989. After taking the helm in 2010, Fabrizia reimagined the school as a dynamic, living space for learning. It’s where cooking, tasting, and talking became tools for deeper connection and transformation. Her approach blends hands-on practice with intellectual inquiry, rooted in the belief that food is not only nourishment but a way to engage with the world. At the heart of her work is Cook the Farm, a six-week program she developed to bridge kitchen and field, tradition and transformation. Through shared meals, farm visits, and conversations with farmers and artisans, participants come to understand food as a living system and themselves as part of it. 

Fabrizia is also the author of several books, including Coming Home to Sicily (2014) and The Food of Sicily (2024), and the producer of two documentaries: Amuri: The Sacred Flavors of Sicily and Amaro. In all her work, she preserves voices and practices that might otherwise be lost and opens space for new stories to take root. @fabrizialanza