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KEVIN KJETIL WHELAN BIO                                   

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My professional career spans nearly three decades across the fields of travel & hospitality, food, and for last two decades, film & television. Before stumbling onto a career in television, I worked for Scandinavian Airlines System in New York. Starting out in the reservations department, I moved on to sales and marketing and eventually joined the company’s initiative to expand service to the Baltic countries, Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union. I traveled extensively to those places as the company developed its regional marketing strategy, and as the song goes ... "the world woke up from history."

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A culinary detour followed. I blame my folks for turning me into a “foodie,” but the next move was all me. One day I decided to quit my job with SAS, enroll at The French Culinary Institute in NYC, and become America’s next top chef. Well, that was the plan anyway. A year later, I graduated with a Certificat d’Aptitude Professionnelle (CAP) and landed my first kitchen job. Six weeks in a posh Upper East Side restaurant as an apprentice nearly did me in. So, what did I do? I jumped from the frying pan into the fire and took off for Europe where I did a stint at a restaurant in Paris. Luckily, my visa expired before the chef’s patience, so I headed to Norway where I landed another restaurant job. And it was there, along the icy shores of some Norwegian fjord, that I realized the recipe for fulfillment probably lay elsewhere.

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So, I returned to the United States and asked SAS for my job back. They agreed, but the new job was in Washington, DC. A few months later, I was sitting at a bar in Georgetown during happy hour. I struck up a conversation with the person next to me, “so what do you do you do for a living,” I asked. “I’m in television,” she replied. Exit left ... lights, camera, action ...

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