Matthew Lee graduated from Harvard College in 1992 with a degree in Fine Arts, magna cum laude, and soon after stuck his diploma in the gap between the fridge and the stove so he could begin boiling peanuts in earnest. As "Matt," he collaborates with his brother, Ted, on writing projects large and small and recently founded a writing workshop to teach professional chefs how to create cookbooks of quality.  Matt and Ted's "The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook," "Lee Bros Simple Fresh Southern" and "The Lee Bros Charleston Kitchen" have won a combined six James Beard Foundation and IACP awards, including the Julia Child Award.  Matt is a contributing editor at Travel + Leisure magazine, since 2001, and writes frequently for publications like Food & Wine, Bon Appetit, GQ, Garden & Gun and The New York Times. He lives in his hometown of Charleston, South Carolina with his wife and two sons, and is on the board of The Signet Society at Harvard.

"The kinds of wide-ranging, tight-focus exercises we went through in Fine Arts--deconstructing abstract images and finding patterns in the architectural residue of ancient cities, to name a few-- are PRECISELY the skills that media mavens need to make sense of the torrent of images and information streaming through the culture.  After Fine Arts, any writing assignment in the lifestyle category is a cakewalk: if you can pen a 25-page paper unpacking the darkest Ad Reinhardt painting, you can certainly scribble off 800 words about your last supper!"