Nina Fallenbaum

Nina F. Ichikawa, formerly Nina Kahori Fallenbaum, is a writer, agricultural activist, and the Executive Director of the Berkeley Food Institute.

Career
As the Executive Director of the Berkeley Institute, Ichikawa has spoken with NBC Bay Area about the importance of urban farming "for elders, for low-income families, for immigrants," and with HuffPost about the history of backyard and rooftop gardening in Asian American communities. She also spoke with The Guardian about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, including that "This is an opportunity for meat-eaters to join together with sustainable producers of meat, and with meat and dairy industry workers, to all unite together and say we want a better system." She has also been featured and quoted for her expertise by KQED.

After the Berkeley Food Institute collaborated with the nonprofit advocacy group Restaurant Opportunities Centers United on a study on racial and gender bias in the restaurant industry, Ichikawa spoke with The New York Times about how "there are biases that lock people into certain positions."

Ichikawa is the former food and agriculture editor for Hyphen magazine, a publication covering Asian-American arts and politics. Her writing has also been published in Nichi Bei Times, Nikkei Heritage, Civil Eats, and Discover Nikkei. She also contributed an essay to the 2013 book Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader. She was a 2011-13 Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy Food and Community Fellow.

Ichikawa worked on the Obama administration's local food initiatives at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and prior to that served as director of programs for Kids First Oakland and the University of California at Berkeley’s Achievement Award scholarship fund, where she led outreach efforts to rural, new immigrant, and Asian American communities and launched cooking programs.

Early Life and Education
Ichikawa was born and grew up in Berkeley, California. Ichikawa attended Berkeley High School, served as a co-coordinator of the Asian Pacific Student Union, and helped to establish the first high school Asian American Studies program in the United States.

Ichikawa graduated with a BA from U.C. Berkeley and an MA from Tokyo's Meiji Gakuin University. She lived in Japan for ten years. After several years on the east coast, she returned to the Bay Area with her husband in 2015.

In January 2021, she was featured in an in-depth profile by the Cal Alumni Association of UC Berkeley.

Personal life
Ichikawa’s great-grandfather emigrated from Japan to the United States in 1895 and purchased land before the California Alien Land Law of 1913. For three years, he and his family lived in a concentration camp during World War II, but continued to pay property taxes on the land.

A photograph of Ichikawa's family, including her grandmother, on a trip to Yosemite National Park in the 1930's is featured in an NBC News article about Asian Americans and the travel industry.

In 2019, the San Francisco Chronicle profiled the efforts of Ichikawa and her husband to house her mother, Betty Kano, an artist and educator, in a "tiny home" on their shared property.