ANNA YURKOVICH
Visual Operations Producer
Anna Yurkovich is a visual storyteller and design strategist who believes food is one of the last real ways we understand the world. As Visual Operations Producer at through food, she shapes the platform’s visual language by turning research, reporting, and memory into evocative images that stick.
Anna was born and raised in Vancouver, where her relationship with food was shaped early by necessity. As a child with severe sensitivities to food colouring and chemical additives, she learned that food could harm—but also heal. Her parents restructured the family's eating habits, replacing processed snacks with homemade alternatives and approaching each meal with care. At her aunt’s house, cookbooks stood in for bedtime stories. Food became a form of comfort, curiosity, and eventually, commitment.
By high school, Anna had cycled through nearly every fad diet. She started to work in kitchens in her early teens and continued into her twenties—first as a chocolatier, then a baker for a café, and a line cook. For a time, she thought she’d become a chef—every job, especially her time working on the line, was a strategic step toward culinary school. But what held her attention wasn’t just the food, but rather the deeper question of why we eat the way we do, and how those choices are shaped by culture, class, and industry.
That curiosity runs in the family. Anna’s great-grandmother, a Croatian immigrant widow who spent most of her life in Vancouver’s Chinatown, ran a boarding house where she cooked paprikash and cabbage rolls for other immigrants. She fed workers daily, housed newcomers, and built community at a time when steady work was scarce, wages were low, and immigrant families often relied on each other to survive. That legacy of care and resilience continues to shape Anna’s work.
While studying visual communication at OCAD University in Toronto, Anna worked in smoothie shops, cafés, and bars across the city’s business district—witnessing how food became stripped of meaning, sold fast, and consumed faster. After graduating, she moved into design roles across Canadian healthcare organizations. Together, those experiences deepened her belief that visuals don’t simply accompany meaning but construct it.