Mashama Bailey is the award-winning Executive Chef and co-founder of Grey Spaces, a group of restaurants, lifestyle, and product offerings, headquartered in Savannah, Georgia. Together with Co-Founder and business partner Johno Morisano, she opened the critically acclaimed restaurant, The Grey, for which she was awarded the James Beard Foundation’s Best Chef Southeast award, followed by its all-day counterpart The Grey Market.

Born in the Bronx, raised in Queens, and with maternal roots from Waynesboro, GA, Mashama attended grammar school in Savannah and first learned to cook at the hands of the women in her family - with grandmothers, aunts, and her mother. Her formal education includes the Institute of Culinary Education (ICE) in New York City and LaVarenne in Burgundy, France.

Prior to The Grey, Mashama’s career includes a dozen years of cooking throughout New York City, the last four of which were at Prune on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, under the tutelage of Gabrielle Hamilton. In 2019 and with the premiere of Netflix’s Chef’s Table Season 6, Mashama became the first African American chef to star on that show.

Together with Johno, she co-wrote Black, White, and The Grey (Ten Speed Press/Penguin Random House), which explores the business partners’ challenges navigating race, class, and culture while building businesses, relationships, and community in the South.

Mashama is the Chairwoman of the Edna Lewis Foundation, whose mission is to honor and extend the legacy of Edna Lewis by creating opportunities for African Americans in the fields of cooking, agriculture, food studies, and storytelling. She is a sought-after guest at food conferences, universities, and on podcasts speaking on the subjects of women in foodways, race, class, culture, and foodways history.

She and Morisano will debut two new restaurants in Austin, TX, the Diner Bar and The Grey Market Austin, both in the forthcoming Thompson Austin Hotel.