Courtney Lapresi: Where Are They Now?

Spoiler note: this post confirms that Courtney Lapresi won her season of MasterChef.

Courtney Lapresi won season 5 of MasterChef in 2014, a 25 year old home cook from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her win came with the usual MasterChef package of a trophy, a cookbook deal, and the grand prize, but her path afterward diverged sharply from the professional chef track many champions pursue. Here is where the years since took her.

The win

Lapresi took the season 5 title in 2014. She competed as a home cook rather than a trained professional, and the win positioned her for a culinary career if she wanted one. As it turned out, her interests would carry her in other directions.

After the trophy

Lapresi's first post win move followed the standard script: she published a cookbook, Everyday Fancy, built around approachable, elegant recipes. But rather than open a restaurant or build a food media brand, she gradually stepped away from professional cooking. According to a profile by Mashed, she later moved into a sales career, and she has spoken publicly about pursuing personal growth and creative writing rather than chasing a chef's life. She has authored writing focused on self improvement and on her own experiences, and she has remained active on social media, sharing snippets of her life rather than a steady stream of food content.

Where things stand now

The honest picture of Lapresi is a champion who used the win as a moment rather than a career foundation. Public reporting indicates she is no longer working as a professional cook and has focused instead on writing, personal development, and other work outside the kitchen. Because her public life is more personal than professional in focus, precise, current details about her day to day work are limited, and rather than overstate them, the accurate statement is that she moved on from cooking as a career and has kept her more recent life relatively low profile. What is solid is the season 5 win and the cookbook that followed it.

To see how she fits among the show's other winners, our guide to every MasterChef US winner lays out the full list, and Courtney's fellow champion Dara Yu, who won season 12, took the opposite path fully into a culinary career.

The takeaway for fans

Lapresi's story is a reminder that not every MasterChef winner wants to be a chef, and that walking away from cooking is a legitimate choice rather than a failure. Her one cookbook still holds up for home cooks who want elegant, doable recipes, and a set of baking sheets covers a lot of that everyday ground. To explore the show that crowned her, the MasterChef US hub keeps every season in one place.