Poh Ling Yeow never thought she’d be here. Sixteen years after first appearing on MasterChef Australia, the beloved TV personality, artist, and chef has earned her first Gold Logie nomination, a moment she described as “really full on.”
Chatting with B&T, she confessed: “I just never thought I’d find myself in this position”.
“It’s usually real industry veterans that get voted for this, so I feel very, very honoured that I’m amongst those considered worthy.”
While many Gold Logie nominees come from long-established presenting or acting backgrounds, Ling Yeow’s career has been a genre-defying whirlwind, from painter and cookbook author to travel host, reality star, MasterChef judge and everything in between.
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In the early days of her TV career, Ling Yeow says she questioned whether she truly belonged. “My first year on telly, when I was on the ABC with my own cooking show, I definitely thought, are you guys sure you want to do this? Because I have no idea what I’m doing”.
But the network believed in her, and Aussie TV fans haven’t looked back since. Despite the self-doubt, Ling Yeow continued to accept new challenges, and each one allowed her to show more of herself.
“Every time I’ve been given work that I don’t think I’m capable of doing, but someone else is obviously telling me that they have confidence in me, I’ve taken it as a chance to rise to the occasion,” she explained. “And every time someone offers me something like that, it’s a validation that I can do it, even if I don’t think I can.”
That leap-of-faith approach has seen her take on a variety of roles across shows like I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!, Lego Masters, Snackmasters and, most recently, her return to 10’s MasterChef as a judge, an experience that’s forced her to further interrogate who she is and what she brings to the screen.
“What’s been really lovely about coming back as a judge is I’ve always been very open about feeling like I don’t know that much,” Ling Yeow said. “And the people that I work with on the show, you know, other producers and stuff, they’ve always said to me, ‘Poh, you don’t have to be anything but yourself.’ And that’s the only direction they’ve given me, which has been so difficult and so fantastic at the same time.”
That simplicity, “just be yourself”, has turned out to be the hardest and most rewarding challenge of all. Ling Yeow’s onscreen presence has always been strikingly warm, curious and undeniably her own, but she admits that staying authentic, particularly as a woman of colour in television, hasn’t always come easily.
“Sometimes it does [feel like a risk], yeah,” she confessed. “Sometimes I still have to sort of take a breather and go, should I say that?”
Ling Yeow’s nomination also carries significant cultural weight in an industry that has long lacked diversity at its highest levels. To date, only one person of colour, Waleed Aly, has ever won the Gold Logie, taking home the honour in 2016. If Ling Yeow were to take home the top honour in 2025, she would be the first woman of colour to do so.
Moreover, only three women have won the award in the last 15 years. As the industry continues to grapple with questions of representation, equity, and authenticity, Ling Yeow is a reminder that diverse stories and storytellers resonate.
“Even as a 51-year-old, I still really yearn to see media content that has people who look like me in it. The thing that I struggled with most growing up was feeling that I looked different. I had confidence in other areas, but that one thing became so massive in my head that it squashed all these parts of me that should have been flourishing,” she said.
“It was such a chip on my shoulder. We can’t underestimate how powerful imprinting is from a young age. Diversity is really important for kids”.
So, if she were to take out the prize when the Logie Awards are decided, among a wealth of thank you’s to the shows and people who got her where she is today, she said she will save a special part of the speech for “little migrant kids out there that might be feeling a little bit like me”.
