JJ Gonson (BFA/BS '91) cooks dinner the way a painter makes a painting. "When I cook a pot of beans, I add flavors in my mind, like they're colors, or shades," she says. "It's definitely the way I express myself. You could say I paint with food."

Gonson is a personal chef, cooking teacher, and local-foods champion based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She goes into clients' homes and cooks a week's worth of meals for them to eat, or she caters their parties, or she shepherds small groups of students through the Harvard Square Farmer's Market for one of her culinary classes at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education. She also hosts occasional One-Night-Culinary-Events (ONCE), for which she prepares elaborate, multi-course meals for customers in private homes, in empty restaurantswherever she can find the space.

That kind of guerilla restaurateur-ing fits with Gonson's history as an off-the-beaten-path punk-rock aficionado. She put herself through school by taking photographs of musicians and bands and selling them to magazines like Rolling Stone, Spin, and Cream. At the Museum School she studied documentary photography and then art education, but graduated just as massive cuts in public education budgets decimated art-teaching jobs. So instead of becoming a teacher, Gonson migrated to Portland, Oregon, and managed rock bands and started a record label. To make money, she worked as a short-order cook.

By the time Gonson returned to Massachusetts a decade later, she was married to a fellow punk-rocker. With a new baby strapped to her chest, she hosted elaborate nightly dinner parties for friends, trying out recipe after recipe. Slowly, she began to cook for other people's parties. "I discovered cooking was as creative for me as photography had been," she says. Now, between caring for her two young kids and promoting local-food issues on her blog, www.cuisineenlocale.com, Gonson runs her chef-for-hire business fulltime.

For inspiration, she reaches back to her childhood, with its roast chicken, meatloaf, clam chowder on Cape Cod, and lots of vegetable stir-fries. "My mom taught me about gardening and growing your own food, and my dad dragged me all over the world and made me taste stinky cheese," Gonson says. "I think I cooked initially because I was trying to recreate memories. Now I draw on those memories to cook."