Hanes Motsinger grew up on a farm in State Road, North Carolina, a rural community located in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Throughout her childhood, she spent the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas helping her grandparents on their small "choose and cut" Christmas tree farm in Allegheny County, North Carolina. In hindsight, that early experience piqued her wonder for the natural world and her curiosity about agriculture and land-based livelihoods.

Today, Hanes' professional life is defined by the pursuit of social and environmental justice, and her engagement with this work has consistently returned to food and agriculture. She has spent time working with farm-to-table kitchens, migrant farmworker rights organizations, agricultural land trusts, and the global coffee sector. She is ecstatic about joining The Nashville Food Project and diving deep into the work of building community and justice through food (what a dream)! When she's not at work, you can find Hanes beekeeping, playing clawhammer banjo, tasting new coffees from around the world, or visiting the mountains of North Carolina. She moved to Nashville in May 2019.