Maya Marie S. [Stansberry] (she/her) is a Black urban farmer and foodways educator from Baltimore, MD (Piscataway, Cherokee, and Lumbee lands) who’s called Brooklyn, NY (Canarsee, Lenni Lenape lands) her home for over 10 years, with her family’s roots in the DMV, Mississippi, and Carolinas. Maya’s earliest lessons of being in relationship to the earth come from the teachings of Black Southern U.S. elders including her grandparents on both sides.

With education and community being principal elements of her upbringing and lineage, Maya is deeply invested in creating accessible spaces for Black and Indigenous people to learn about land stewardship/agriculture, foodways, and health that center their personal stories and food traditions. She believes that land stewardship and foodways education are holistic means for communities of color to (re)engage with their history and health while tapping into their power for social change.

Her interests in food have led her to earn a culinary arts degree, to apprentice at the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at UC Santa Cruz where she studied Ecological and Sustainable Horticulture, and to earn a degree in community/public health at Hunter College. Concurrently, for 9+ years Maya was a land steward at Kingsborough Community College’s Urban Farm, first as a volunteer then student crew member, and later as the assistant farm manager and food education coordinator prior to resigning in 2021.

In 2020 Maya was a CoFED Racial Justice Fellow where she also completed the Build. Unlearn. Decolonize program and would incubate the Deep Routes project. Maya launched Deep Routes in late 2020, and it is a Black-led educational project that uplifts the foodways of African and Indigenous diasporas through culinary and agricultural workshops/courses, curricular materials and media.

Through Deep Routes Maya has created recurrent workshop series including “The Soul of Food” and “Flour Play: An Afro-Indigenous Centered Baking Lab” as well as one-off series like Solstice to Solstice, River Bites, and more. Deep Routes has also published The Deep Routes Core Curriculum (2021), An Manje: A Celebration of Haitian Foodways (2024), and several mini books on plants and foods written by herself and other Black, Indigenous and/or Asian writers. Maya also now stewards plots at East New York Farms for Deep Routes’ educational programming.

Within and outside of Deep Routes, Maya has developed and led talks, workshops, and events centered on Afro-Indigenous foodways, sustainable agriculture practices, and other topics at universities including NYU, Columbia, and Cornell; as well as in partnership with government, NGO, and grassroots organizations including Greenthumb, New York Restoration Project, Green Guerillas, Rocksteady Farm, East New York Farms, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, BKRot and more. Additionally, Maya has taught several urban agricultural courses for Farm School NYC’s Citywide Certificate and LaGuardia Community College’s Environmental Science degree programs.

When Maya isn’t farming, teaching, or writing she continues to combine her love of cooking, agriculture, science, and history by creating photography pieces for her personal documentation project Seeds & Receipts.