Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Social practice, culinary art
Website: leifhedendal.com
Leif Hedendal is a San Francisco chef and social-practice artist whose two-decade career has blurred the line between the kitchen and the studio. Largely self-taught, he trained briefly at the San Francisco restaurants Citron and Greens and took stints at Chez Panisse in Berkeley and at noma in Copenhagen, grounding his cooking in micro-seasonality, humanely raised meat, under-utilized vegetables, urban agriculture, and wild foraging.
In 2008, after attending a social-practice conference at UC Santa Cruz, Hedendal began to frame his cooking explicitly as an art practice. That year he launched Dinner Discussion, an ongoing monthly series held in his Mission District apartment that brings artists, curators, and writers together with chefs, farmers, and food activists around a shared meal. He was a delegate to Slow Food’s Terra Madre conference in Turin, Italy, in 2010, and has coordinated international events for Outstanding in the Field.
Hedendal has repeatedly partnered with visual artists and institutions to realize food-based projects: he co-curated the culinary program, with Alice Waters, for Doug Aitken’s cross-country traveling art project Station to Station (2013); produced An Exhibition in Your Mouth with artist Ben Kinmont at Kadist Art Foundation’s San Francisco space (2012), a multi-course meal built from art-historical recipes; and collaborated with artist David Horvitz on Teach Your Children to Slurp Noodles (2025) at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. He continues to produce one-off commissions for galleries and private collectors, including Birthday Cake (2026) for San Francisco gallerist Micki Meng. In June 2026 he began hosting a monthly film-screening series in collaboration with Perrin Meyer called Meyer Lemon Cinema.
Hedendal works at the intersection of cooking and participatory art, treating a shared meal as both a social space and a conceptual medium. His projects favor unpretentious, intimate settings — a living room floor, a low coffee table, a sidewalk — over gallery walls, and he treats invitations, menus, and documentation as loosely artistic gestures rather than formal announcements. Recurring concerns include community and communality, food politics, sustainable agriculture, and exchange across subcultures; he often collaborates closely, and builds a menu directly in response to another artist’s work, translating artworks, films, and sound pieces into courses, ingredients, or rituals of eating.
Though he resists fully claiming the “artist” label, his cooking practice has been embraced by numerous Bay Area art institutions as a form of creative practice, appearing alongside conceptual and performance-based work in museum and gallery programming, from Jessica Silverman Gallery to The LAB.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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