About Enjoyiana

I'm Enjoyiana Nururdin, a journalist, writer, storyteller, curious cook, avid reader, spiritual baddie, daughter, sister, and lifelong lover of beautiful and delicious things.

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I'm a Black woman from the Midwest who has always had a feeling that my life was supposed to be bigger than one place, one job, or even one version of myself.

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So I'm building it.

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My work lives at the intersection of storytelling, culture, food, travel, politics, creativity, and the human experience. I'm interested in the stories hiding underneath everyday life: who gets to shape our communities, where our food comes from, why people believe what they believe, how culture travels, what makes a place feel like home, and how we become the people we're meant to be.

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Journalism gave me my foundation. It taught me how to ask questions, follow a story, listen closely, find the receipts, and understand that every person carries a history with them.

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But journalism is only one part of me. I've always been drawn to food and the stories around the table. My obsession started as a kid making fried chicken and watching the Food Network, followed by a seventh-grade homemade cookbook, a high school culinary competition, food reporting in college, and eventually studying the relationship between food, Blackness, politics, and community in graduate school at Columbia Journalism School.

 

Along the way, I had the opportunity to work in culinary storytelling as an associate producer on From the Source with Chef Katie Button. That experience brought me closer to the kind of storyteller I had imagined becoming for years: someone who could cook, interview, travel, ask big questions, and invite people to the table all at once.

 

And I'm still becoming her. Today, I'm less interested in fitting myself into one professional title and more interested in building a body of work that feels like me. That means reporting on local government and civic life. It means writing essays about being a Black woman figuring out adulthood. It means exploring food and culture. It means dreaming about travel and documenting what I find when I get there. It means making room for spirituality, beauty, books, creativity, and the strange little observations that make a life feel like a life.

 

It means creating things simply because I want to see them exist.

 

The Life I'm Building

I want a career that lets me tell stories and experience the world at the same time.

I want to cook and learn from people who know food better than I do. I want to sit at tables across the world and hear the stories attached to what's being served. I want to make journalism that is rigorous without losing its humanity. I want to write things that don't need a newsroom's permission to exist.

 

I want to travel.

I want to read more books than I can possibly finish.

I want to make things.

I want to become a better cook.

I want to create media that makes people curious.

I want to build community.

I want to have conversations that are honest enough to change something.

And I want a life that has room for joy.

Because I've spent a lot of my life learning how to work hard, achieve things, and make myself useful. I'm now learning something just as important: I am allowed to enjoy the life I'm working so hard to build.

 

What I Believe

I believe stories can change how we understand one another.

I believe food can tell us about history, migration, politics, family, power, survival, and love.

I believe Black women deserve to be complicated, curious, soft, ambitious, funny, spiritual, intellectual, glamorous, messy, adventurous, and fully human.

I believe asking better questions can change a life.

I believe curiosity is a form of freedom.

I believe there is room for both rigor and wonder.

And I believe we don't have to choose between being serious about the world and enjoying our time in it.

That's the thread running through everything I make.

Enjoy the journey.

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I'm still figuring out exactly where mine is going, but I'm having a pretty good time finding out.