At the helm of the boutique marketing and PR firm Sauce LA, Shawna and her team consult clients, including many of the city’s top chefs and award-winning restaurants, on the virtues of grassroots, social and viral media alongside traditional PR. Shawna and her team have launched more than ffifty projects of their clients’ and their own in the last six years from downtown’s Lazy Ox and Lindy & Grundy to Bill Chait’s Sprout Group restaurants Test Kitchen, Sotto and Picca to Short Order, Short Cake and Playa, to Bestia, Petty Cash and Republique, creating one of the city’s most prolific press machines. The team currently works with a client roster of talent that ranges from top chefs and brands to some of the city’s most iconic, historic restaurants.

She’s also dreamt up and developed her own brand events like the historic crowd drawing LA Food Fest and trendsetting Artisanal LA, a biannual downtown event showcasing the best independent and sustainable chefs, edibles, makers and home goods that’s evolved into a growing brand with regular pop-ups and events with partners like the Producers Guild of America, Coachella, West Elm and Whole Foods. Both brands and their events are going strong in their sixth and seventh years and are still curated, managed and produced entirely in-house. Shawna’s currently working on the launch of two new projects including an all new LA Food Fest at Expo Park in partnership with the independent promoter Nederlander for Summer 2016, and a completely new event, the Clean Food Fest merging winning event formulas with mindful eats, drinks, sweets and education for a first of its kind event in 2017.

She’s passionate about supporting and creating marketing opportunities for other small business owners helping them get from idea to execution. Shawna, her brands and clients have been featured in numerous publications from the Los Angeles Times and LA Weekly to Bon Appétit and New York Magazine and she was most recently recognized by the Mayor’s Office of the City of Los Angeles for her work supporting fellow entrepreneurs through Artisanal LA. She’s partnered with the city’s brightest luminaries on a number of community projects including a recent bid for the Greek Theatre with Nederlander/AEG and Old Pasadena’s Artisanal LA Holiday Market in partnership with the City of Pasadena. She gives her time to teach various groups about marketing and PR, is a Kiva Trustee and a proud board member for a number of local groups and associations.

Shawna’s a lover of all things LA who traded her Carthay Circle digs for the urban foodie hippy haven that is Altadena that she now calls home with her Welshman, their three cats, a feisty four pound rescue dog named Spike and their foster babies.