about
Sally is the founder and editor of Improvisedlife.com, a virtual sourcebook for inventive living. It features ideas and tools that antidote the ordinary, from home design and cooking to productivity and self-expression: anything that requires a resourceful, problem-solving mindset.
In her private consulting, she helps clients shift their thinking and see new possibilities for their projects, spaces and work. They include creative people of all stripes who need help navigating painful blocks, or professional reinvention, or unlocking/decoding solutions to practical challenges in writing, art, film, interior design...
Sally was a photographer who morphed into a chef and then into an award-winning food writer, editor and stylist. She contributed to Food&Wine, Saveur, Self and The New York Times among others, and appeared on national TV and radio. Food was a BIG thing but not the whole thing. She also started designing: photography rental spaces, furniture, books you could eat...
In her private consulting, she helps clients shift their thinking and see new possibilities for their projects, spaces and work. They include creative people of all stripes who need help navigating painful blocks, or professional reinvention, or unlocking/decoding solutions to practical challenges in writing, art, film, interior design...
Sally was a photographer who morphed into a chef and then into an award-winning food writer, editor and stylist. She contributed to Food&Wine, Saveur, Self and The New York Times among others, and appeared on national TV and radio. Food was a BIG thing but not the whole thing. She also started designing: photography rental spaces, furniture, books you could eat...
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She wrote award-winning cookbooks designed to welcome cooks IN to improvising and finding their creative voice in the kitchen. It was the start of developing ways to help people improvise and break through their fears.
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Food styling is, at its very heart, improvising. Sally figured out how to put a milk mustache on celebrities for Annie Liebovitz, make pasta on-the-fly in Venice for Christopher Baker and gold leaf pears for Maria Robledo. Perhaps the most challenging was wrangling live snails to slide along the edge of an oyster for Irving Penn for a photograph in the Museum of Modern Art's collection...
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Her work as a journalist took her into the fields and homes of saffron farmers in Spain... truffle hunting in France and Italy...documenting a rare culture in Appalachia. She had to FIND the story: following trails, one thing leading to another, and then another...to essential sources and images...
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For over twenty years, she has been a contributor to public radio’s The Splendid Table, where she talks about improvising in the kitchen and at table. Stream her shows here.
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Sally was the "conceptualist" of an artist’s book collaboration that is in many rare book collections, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, Yale's Beinecke Rare Book Library, and the San Francisco Museum. It is a prose poem impressed in sheets of saffron pasta (instead of paper) by running it through a vintage letterpress. You can boil it up and eat the words! Read about it here.
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She created photography rental locations in Greenwich Village, Chelsea and Harlem that have been used in style books, magazine stories, videos and ads.
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These days she works in the Harlem space she gutted and reconfigured to be Mission Control for ImprovisedLife.com, consulting projects, Skype sessions, and product design.