Festival director Joanna Savill is a journalist, presenter, linguist and world traveller, with a particular fascination for food, wherever she may find it.
This is her second year in the director’s chair, after an enormously successful inaugural festival in 2009 - during which more than 300,000 people attended a massive 438 individual events.
Covering everything from Sydney’s hidden food secrets to extraordinary dinners in our finest restaurants, the festival program is line with Joanna’s personal vision that good food and food-related events are for everyone, and can happen everywhere.
Joanna is also co-editor of the best-selling Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) Good Food Guide and contributor to a number of Australian and international magazines and newspapers. She is an occasional SMH food and restaurant columnist, author of the SBS Eating Guides to eating out and shopping in fifty different nationalities, and co-creator/presenter of the highly-acclaimed TV format, The Food Lovers’ Guide to Australia, which has been seen world-wide over the last 13 years.
As a presenter, consultant, moderator and MC, Joanna has hosted and coordinated events across Australia and overseas. She has also designed and led culinary tours to Vietnam with adventure travel company, World Expeditions.
In a previous life she travelled the globe as an international television news and current affairs reporter/producer and accredited translator. But she thinks exploring the world of food is equally exciting.
