Born in Tehran to a Jewish family, Tannaz has lived in Los Angeles since she was a baby, when her family fled Iran during the 1979 revolution. Growing up at her mother’s feet in the kitchen, Tannaz absorbed her mother’s passion for expressing love and building community through feeding everyone. Her love of food grew as she explored her city’s world-class culinary landscape, expanding her palate across continents and cultures. As a food writer, Tannaz researches and documents the cuisine of Iran’s regional Jewish communities, and develops recipes that celebrate the flavors of her Iranian Jewish heritage. Her work seeks to preserve the rich culinary legacy of Iran’s Jewish communities, while drawing on the sophisticated pluralistic flavors gleaned from living in Los Angeles.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Tannaz wrote a piece for Zaman Collective on stirring halva, Shavuot rice pudding, and processing grief together in isolation. She wrote a long-form piece on her research on Iranian Jewish food for Ajam Media Collective. She’s developed recipes for Food & Wine, The Nosher, and The Forward, and explored her mashup identity through music for Zócalo Public Square’s Diaspora Jukebox series. She leads live online and in-person cooking classes and demos, and was a guest chef at the 2026 B’teavon culinary retreat. In 2025, she co-produced Erev Yalda, a short film exploring the intersection of Hanukkah and Yalda, the Persian winter solstice celebration.
Her ongoing research brings together family recipes, oral histories, and culinary traditions preserved in the diaspora to build a body of work she hopes to publish as an Iranian Jewish cookbook.
