Cooking with Koppell Brings the Office of Inclusive Excellence to the Table

Cooking with Koppell kicked off its sixth season with a watch party that brought students, faculty and staff together to celebrate food, personal stories and the team of students who produced all four episodes of the season from start to finish.

The Office of Inclusive Excellence and the College of Communication and Media (CCOM) hosted the Nov. 4 event in CCOM’s Morehead Lounge, where attendees gathered to watch content from the new season.

The show features President Jonathan Koppell cooking with members of the Montclair community to prepare food reminiscent of their childhood or meaningful to their heritage. But the underlying reason for the show is to provide a unique opportunity for CCOM students, who work tirelessly each semester to shoot, produce, edit and launch each season’s episodes through Assistant Teaching Professor Nicole Pometti’s Film and Television Special Topics class. The episodes CCOM students produce align with the University’s goals to provide hands-on learning opportunities and better prepare students for their first job and beyond.

“It’s the students who are doing the work,” Koppell said. “That’s what makes it enjoyable for me, but it is also what makes it such a great illustration of this university at its best. The goal of this is not just to produce the programs, it’s to teach the students.”

This partnership with the Office of Inclusive Excellence reflects the show’s original purpose of celebrating diversity and inclusion by highlighting the experiences that make members of the Montclair community unique.

“I just want to thank all of you for your ideas, for your contributions and for thinking about the spirit of the beauty of Montclair,” said Dr. Ashante Connor, Associate Vice President of Inclusive Excellence and Special Advisor to the President. Dr. Connor also encouraged members of the community to submit their ideas for the show since the cook-off concept originated with an employee’s suggestion to create a Top Chef-style competition.

“I appreciate that Ashante saw the alignment with what the Office of Inclusive Excellence was supposed to be about and that we can build on it,” Koppell said.

The two-part cook-off added friendly competition to this season. Two Montclair faculty, Professor Jesse Ha and Professor Jamie Wisniewski-Stec members prepared unique, personal dishes for a panel of three judges from the University community. Part One debuted Nov. 2, followed by Part Two on Nov. 4, with its YouTube premiere coinciding with the watch party.

Professor Pometti, who emceed the event, said the gathering represented another way to expand the show’s reach and invite more people to participate. “Our goal is to expand our outreach and meet more people involved in our campus community.” 

Student learning remains at the center of the behind-the-scenes show experience. Each semester, a new group of students take on  camera operation, lighting, and audio and editing. A student animator also created the show’s opening animation.

“They’re the ones behind the camera. They’re the ones who are setting up the lights, doing audio and editing each episode,” Pometti said. “The amount of work that they put into it is incredibly impressive.”

Episodes are filmed one semester and released the next, giving students time to complete post-production while gaining practical experience producing a series for a public audience. The students who worked on Season 6 were Rozin Abdat, Mars Adams, Charles Bailey, Ben Capp, Jack Coleman, Ellie Fisher-Shah, Carlos Flores-Ospina, Jeff Glanville, Maksym Korobchuk, Luciana Martinez, Danna Mitchell, Isabel Moral, Leslie Morales-Aparicio, Jack Nachbaur, Matthew Nelson, Michael O'Keefe, Jade Ortega, Gabriel Pascual, Olivia Patino-Sim, Jayla Price, Ernesto Ramirez, Alicia Ramos, Brian Scott, Dylan Sullivan, Danny Tarifa-Ramirez, Lissette Ventura.

Season 6 continues on Montclair’s YouTube channel with Episode 3 on Nov. 18 and Episode 4 on Dec. 2. Viewers can also watch Part One and Part Two of The Cook-Off.