Kutography.

Anya Ku was a student at EBCLC’s Youth Defender Clinic for two semesters in 2019.

She entered Berkeley Law knowing that she wanted to be an attorney in Dependency Court to support children. After recommendations from her peers, Anya applied to EBCLC’s Youth Defender Clinic, where she gained hands-on experience working closely with youth and practicing juvenile law…

What does it mean to be a womxn of color in law?

It wasn’t long after I began law school that the idea for this project came about. Due to a history of exclusivity reinforced through laws and in the legal profession, law school was not always an option for someone like me. Despite Berkeley Law’s best efforts…

Page 29: Anya Ku wasn’t aspiring to culinary renown when she and high school friend Elazar Sontag began to interview and photograph Oakland locals cooking dishes from their respective cultures. She was simply passionate about photography and her city’s vibrant diversity.

“I’ve lived in Oakland my entire life. There’s a special sense of community here,” Ku…

A Sisterhood of Support

As a young girl Anya dreamed of being an engineer so her parents enrolled her in Girls Inc. of Alameda County’s STEM programming when she was in 7th grade.

She was skeptical at first, unsure of the staff promoting the idea of sisterhood and friendship. Anya had always been independent and driven to achieve on her own…

According to family lore, for the first few years of her life, Anya Ku didn’t recognize the difference between blue and gold. She’d spent so much time on the UC Berkeley campus—where her mother was finishing her degree—that the school’s colors were inexorably linked in her mind…

There’s no shortage of cookbooks around. But when two Oakland teens decided to Pen a culinary ode to their city’s eclectic neighborhoods, what emerged was something altogether different–and charming.

Elazar Sontag and Anya Ku’s “Flavors of Oakland” is a cookbook in 20 stories…

Anya Ku and Elazar Sontag are perhaps an unlikely pair. Ku is a photographer who honed her craft taking portraits for her high-school newspaper and yearbook. Sontag is a cook and blogger who’s done stints at Oakland restaurants Pizzaiolo and Duende. Ku wasn’t “much of a foodie.” Sontag didn’t know the first thing about photography…

When Anya heard about the Oakland Neighborhood Project she was eager to be a part of it, and when I discovered what she is doing, I knew she had to be. Visit her Flavors of Oakland website and you’ll see why. Just out of high school at Oakland Tech, Anya is in the midst of a creating a cookbook about Oakland food as a way to bring people together to break down the barriers that keep us apart. As she puts it, “we connect…