SHIVA REDDY

Shiva Reddy is a Vancouver-based food and wine expert, sommelier, broadcaster, and storyteller whose work explores the intersections of food, culture, and identity. A longtime voice in Vancouver’s culinary community, she is a food and wine columnist for CBC and has worked with some of the city’s leading restaurants, including Michelin-starred Burdock & Co.

She is the host of Not Your Butter Chicken, the CBC Gem and TELUS Originals documentary series that follows Shiva across Western Canada as she explores South Asian food, migration, community, and her own relationship to cultural inheritance. Inspired in part by her mother’s dementia diagnosis and Shiva’s experience as her primary caregiver, the series became a deeply personal search for the recipes, memories, and stories connecting her to her heritage. Her performance earned her a 2025 Leo Award nomination for Best Host in an Information, Lifestyle or Reality Series.

Born and raised in Vancouver to parents who immigrated from Fiji, Shiva brings a second generation Indo-Fijian perspective to conversations around diaspora, belonging, and cultural memory. In Feeding the Diaspora, she joins Katie Prasad-Keough to prepare jinga, a beloved Indo-Fijian dish. Opening an intimate conversation through their shared heritage, exploring anticipatory grief, caregiving and loss in dementia, and the generational legacy of girmit, the colonial system that brought Indian indentured labourers to Fiji from 1879-1916.