Diana Zheng
Founder + Creative Director
📍 Los Angeles
I’m a creative director, storyteller, designer, and builder of brands that thrive in the space between cultures.
Born in China and raised in the US, I followed an academic path to degrees from Columbia (BA, Economics and Sustainable Development) and Harvard (MPH, Health Policy and Management). I spent years in public health consulting and strategic planning, thinking about complex and interconnected problems. Though the work was important, I also felt a growing hunger to better understand my own heritage and explore the creative instincts I’d been stifling.
I decided to write a cookbook, Jia! The Food of Swatow and the Teochew Diaspora, as an homage to the food of my family. I researched, recipe-tested, wrote, photographed, and designed this cookbook that started as a labor of love — and became a portal for me to connect with the gaginang community around the world. I was interviewed on KCRW’s Good Food podcast, wrote about the cuisine for Epicurious, and lamented Teochew cuisine’s “branding problem” way back in 2019 for this Los Angeles Times article.
I then co-founded tea and teaware brand Three Gems Tea to share the gong fu tea culture of southeastern China with a new audience abroad. Our mission was straightforward: make tea breaks good, simple, and fun. This meant responsibly sourcing organic loose leaf teas direct from farms, collaborating with ceramic artists in the US and Asia, and inviting new tea drinkers to the table with approachable education. Our teas were named a “Best Tea” by the New York Times’ Wirecutter, and recommended by Bloomberg, GQ, Bon Appétit, and the Los Angeles Times, among other outlets. Our brand and founder stories were also featured in a global ad campaign for Chase Bank.
Dreaming up and building my own brands has taught me that the most compelling narratives are rooted in a founder’s lived experience. I started Studio See-See for other founders of brands with real depth — to help them uncover what makes their story singular, and then translate it faithfully across cultures and platforms.