Kristin Atwood, an alumna of the Durham College (DC) Culinary Management program, has been combining her passion for food and filmmaking since graduating in 2017. What began as a freelance gig creating media content for local restaurants, has since evolved into an award-winning independent production company called Chef Studio, where she produces cooking tutorials and web series that bring the joy and magic of cooking to digital streaming and video-on-demand platforms.

With more than 5 million views on her channel, Kristin has been able to turn Chef Studio into a thriving full-time job, allowing her to showcase her creativity and skill in cinematography, as well as her culinary prowess as she helps others learn to cook. It’s also landed her two incredible nominations.

This week, her At Home Pasta series was nominated for an Emmy® Award – which recognizes outstanding achievement in daytime television – in the Outstanding Single Camera Editing category. The seven-part series was inspired by the lack of kitchen staples available in grocery stores during the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic, when “panic buying” was at it’s worst. Using a few simple ingredients, Kristin was able to develop unique recipes, like beet pasta or egg yolk and ricotta ravioli, and created short films that explain how viewers could easily replicate these meals at home.

Chef Studio is up against five other programs in this category from Netflix, Hulu, and the Food Network, with the winner set to be announced at the 48th Annual Daytime Emmy Awards Lifestyle Programming ceremony on Sunday, July 18 at 8 p.m. ET. The series was also recently nominated for two Webby Awards in the Best Food and Drink and Best How-To, Explainer and DIY categories.

Prior to her Emmy nomination, Kristin was also recognized in 2020 with a prestigious nomination for a James Beard Foundation Award – America’s most coveted and comprehensive honour for chefs, restaurants, journalists, authors and other leaders in the food and beverage industry – for her series The Crumby Bits. With a focus on creating something beautiful and delicious out of ingredients that would have normally been considered scrap, waste, wilted or worthless, Chef Studio’s Cricket Macaron episode received its nomination in the Online Video, Fixed Location and/or Instructional category for its innovative take on culinary sustainability.

Kristin was also recently the recipient of an Alpha Female+ Grant. For her grant project, she intends to create a five-part series called Flight of the Bumblebees which will celebrate the beauty of spring and summer, and highlight the important work honeybees do during those seasons.

Congratulations to Kristin for her incredible culinary and filmmaking successes – your DC family is cheering you on from home!

Watch one of Kristin’s Chef Studio videos below – Making an Edible Forest Floor, as part of her Best Laid Schemes cooking series inspired by the lands and lochs of Scotland, where she currently resides.