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Tanya Denckla Cobb is a writer and a professional public policy mediator who has taught food system planning and group facilitation at the University of Virginia. She has deep experience in mediating and facilitating challenging issues, drawing on her work in international labor rights, community mediation, and as a former nonprofit director.

While working for the federal government in the early 1980's, Tanya specialized in international labor rights and served on U.S. delegations to the U.N. International Labor Organization in Geneva. She then worked at the grassroots, co-founding and serviing as Executive Director of a community forestry nonprofit "Greener Harrisonburg," and later serving as the first Executive Director of the Virginia Urban Forest Council. At the same time, she became trained as a mediator and became one of the first Virginia-certified mediators in 1993. Eventually she became a certified mediator mentor and trainer while working with the Community Mediation Center of Charlottesville.

Since 1997, she has worked at the UVA Institute for Engagement & Negotiation (IEN) where her work involves facilitating and mediating a broad range of community and environmental issues, and also conducting a wide range of trainings in conflict management and negotiation. In 1999, she co-founded and continues to serve as teaching faculty for the Virginia Natural Resources Leadership Institute. She also teaches since 2006 a seminar for the National Preservation Institute on negotiation and conflict for cultural and natural resource managers. In 2004, she pioneered with UVA professor Timothy Beatley a series of graduate-level courses on food system planning, which she continued to teach for eight years. In 2007 she coordinated the first Virginia Food Security Summit and co-facilitated the founding of the Virginia Food System Council. Since 2015 she has served as Director of IEN. She is passionate about bringing people together to discover common ground and create solutions for mutual gain.

At home, she enjoys the restorative energy of gardening and cooking from her garden. She lives in central Virginia, and is the author of "Reclaiming Our Food: How the Grassroots Food Movement is Changing What We Eat" (2011) and "The Backyard Homestead Guide to Growing Organic Food" (2024), which is a completely updated and redesigned version of her three earlier organic gardening books (also sold on Amazon).

She has co-authored a chapter - “Communities: Teaming with Companies, Cities, States, Academia (The RAFT)” - in "Collaborating for Climate Resilience," edited by Ann Goodman. (Routledge: 2022). She also co-authored a chapter - “Community Food Interventions for Healing: The Cases of Janus Youth and Lynchburg Grows” - in "Healthy Environments, Healing Spaces: Practices and Directions in Health, Planning and Design," edited by Timothy Beatley, Carla Jones, and Reuben Rainey (UVA Press: 2018).

Photo credit: Tom Daly, University of Virginia