Today we’d like to introduce you to Dominique Chanelle Cancio.
Hi Dominique Chanelle, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
My story has never followed a perfectly straight line, but food, creativity, and storytelling have always been at the center of it. I began my career in food, working as a pastry chef, where I learned that what we make and what we eat can carry so much more than flavor. Food holds memory, culture, family, identity, and a sense of place. Over time, my creative life expanded beyond the kitchen into design, illustration, photography, content creation, and eventually community-centered storytelling. Becoming a mother gave me an even deeper awareness of what we inherit, what we preserve, and what we pass forward. I found myself thinking more about the women around me and the incredible stories that exist in kitchens, small businesses, studios, gardens, markets, and neighborhoods, many of which are rarely documented with the care they deserve. That thinking eventually became Her Table & Friends, a storytelling and gathering project centered on women through the lens of food, craft, cultural memory, and community. I wanted to create something that could celebrate what women make while also asking deeper questions about who they are, where they come from, what they carry, and why their work matters. This summer, I brought that idea into the physical world with our first Birthday Table, a limited-edition collaboration with four women in San Diego’s food community. Each baker created an original pastry rooted in memory, celebration, and storytelling, and we brought everything together through food, art, a printed zine, and a community pickup.
That experience helped me see Her Table & Friends not simply as a food platform, but as something much larger: a living archive of women, creativity, culture, and community being documented while it is still unfolding. I’m still building it, and I think that is an important part of my story too. Her Table & Friends is growing alongside me, shaped by my experiences as an artist, former pastry chef, storyteller, mother, and woman who believes ordinary lives and everyday acts of making are worth remembering.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Definitely not, although I think I’ve stopped expecting a creative life to be a smooth road. One of my biggest challenges has been accepting that my work doesn’t fit neatly into one category. I’ve worked in food, design, illustration, photography and storytelling, and for a long time I felt pressure to choose one thing and build a conventional career around it. Eventually I began to understand that the thread connecting those disciplines is actually the work itself. I’m interested in memory, place, culture, everyday beauty and the stories people carry, and different projects simply require different mediums.
There have also been very practical challenges. Building a sustainable creative career while raising a young child has forced me to reconsider my relationship with time, ambition and productivity. There have been projects that didn’t work, opportunities I didn’t receive, periods where I had to step away, and moments when I genuinely questioned what direction I should go next. Her Table & Friends has gone through some of that evolution too. It grew out of earlier ideas and experiments rather than arriving fully formed. Even after launching our first physical collaboration this summer, I intentionally took some time away from it rather than immediately trying to produce the next thing. I wanted to understand what worked, what mattered, and what the project actually wanted to become. I think one of the biggest things I’ve learned is that changing direction isn’t necessarily starting over. Sometimes the things that look disconnected while you’re living them become the exact experiences you needed for the next body of work. I’m much more comfortable with that now.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I’m a multidisciplinary artist, designer, and storyteller, and my work often lives at the intersection of visual art, creative direction, food, memory, culture, and place. I’ve never been particularly interested in staying inside one medium. Depending on the story, I might work through digital collage, illustration, photography, design, editorial storytelling, or a physical experience. What connects all of it is my interest in noticing the things we often overlook and finding a visual language that makes them feel meaningful again. I’m especially drawn to personal histories, everyday rituals, cultural memory, and the relationship between people and the places they inhabit. Her Table & Friends is one expression of that practice. I created it as a space centered on women and their stories through the lens of food, craft, memory, and community. What excites me most is being able to use all of my creative disciplines together to help another woman tell her story in a way she may never have had the opportunity to before. Sometimes that means interviewing her. Sometimes it means photographing what she makes, designing an editorial piece around her story, creating an event, or finding another visual way to translate something deeply personal into something other people can experience. I think creative direction is increasingly becoming an important part of my practice because I love looking at the whole story and asking, “What is the most meaningful way for someone else to experience this?” I’m interested not only in making beautiful things, but in creating the world around an idea and deciding which mediums will communicate it best. That is also where I see my work continuing to grow. I want to collaborate with more women, artists, makers, businesses, and organizations who have meaningful stories but may need help finding the visual language, narrative, or creative direction to tell them. Her Table & Friends gives me a space to explore that collaboratively, while my broader creative practice allows those relationships to grow into many different kinds of work. What I’m most proud of is creating work that feels deeply personal without being closed off. I want someone to encounter something I’ve made and recognize a little bit of their own memory, family, neighborhood, or experience inside it.
Any big plans?
I’m in a really exciting period of bringing the different parts of my creative life into clearer focus. I’ve spent years working across art, design, food, storytelling, content, and community, and I’m no longer interested in treating those as unrelated paths. I recently relaunched Dee Chanelle Design, my multidisciplinary creative practice, where I bring those skills together through creative direction, brand storytelling, design, content, and visual experiences. I’m especially interested in working with people and brands that have something meaningful behind what they do and helping them translate that into a visual world and story that feels distinctly their own. At the same time, I’m continuing to develop Her Table & Friends as one of my larger storytelling projects. I see it becoming a living archive of women and the things they create, carry, and pass forward. I want to document stories while they’re still unfolding through interviews, photography, short films, printed pieces, gatherings, food, art, and physical artifacts. What excites me is that these parts of my practice can feed one another without needing to become the same thing. Her Table & Friends gives me space to experiment, document, gather people, and tell stories that I believe deserve attention. Dee Chanelle Design gives me a professional home for bringing that same kind of creative thinking and direction into collaborations with artists, makers, businesses, and organizations. I’m also continuing to develop my own visual art practice, particularly work around memory, place, cultural identity, and the way ordinary environments hold personal history. So the future feels less like choosing one direction and more like finally building an ecosystem where all of those directions can coexist. I’m interested in creating work that is beautiful, but also work that remembers something, reveals something, or gives someone a way to see their own story differently.
Pricing:
- Contact: deechanelledesign@gmail.com
Contact Info:
- Website: https://deechanelledesign.framer.website/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/deechanelledesign/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/deechanellecancio/
