Norma Listman is a Mexico City-Oakland based chef and artist. Her practice both as a chef and artist is dictated by her heritage, she is most interested in traditional cooking methods and the historical periods of Mexican gastronomy. Listman’s passion for the preservation of her culture and her father’s life-long work with maize have ignited her interest for working with native varieties of the crop. Her interest in the preservation of traditional values demands the closest attention to local farming procedures.

She began her career in some of the most prestigious restaurants of the Bay Area. She managed nationally acclaimed Camino Restaurant and long time Bay Area institution BayWolf Restaurant in Oakland, before deciding to follow her passion and become a professional chef. She was mentored in the kitchen by Chefs Anthony Strong of Delfina Group in San Francisco and Russell More of Camino in Oakland. Included in her past culinary and artistic practice are A Sors, a historical-food performance commissioned by the Andy Warhol foundation held in commemoration of the beheading of the Austrian-placed Mexican emperor Maximilian; and an artist collaboration dinner for Museo Experimental El Eco’s 60th anniversary in Mexico City.

As a food scholar she is an active teacher at 18 Reasons Organization in San Francisco, where she instructs Mexican culinary techniques. She has experience lecturing in universities across the United States and Mexico in the topics of Mexican food history, traditional agricultural practices and the present state of Mexican gastronomy in global food culture. She currently resides in Mexico City and is focused on her research of  Mexican native corn and nixtamalization.