Nana Amoako-Anin is a Ghanaian-American lawyer, educator, organizational leader and pioneer in Ghana’s modern wellness industry. Her work brings together strategic leadership, culture, belonging, education, wellness and community.
After building her early career in New York City across education, law and finance, Nana relocated from New York to Ghana with her family in 2013. That same year, she founded Bliss Yoga Accra, one of Ghana’s pioneering yoga and wellness institutions, at a time when wellness was still an emerging space in the country. Over more than a decade, she has helped build a wellness community, train practitioners and contribute to the development of Ghana’s broader wellness ecosystem.
Nana is regularly consulted by organizations and institutions developing wellness programming and wellness strategy. She began her career as a public school teacher in New York City, then worked with the Children’s Defense Fund and was appointed an Assistant District Attorney in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. Her career has since spanned law, finance, technology, education, wellness and social impact, giving her a multidisciplinary perspective on people, institutions and leadership.
Today, she serves as the Director of Wellness for the American Embassy Association in Accra, and Chief People & Culture Officer at an emerging Ghanaian AI technology platform. Her work examines how the body informs leadership, culture, health and education, and includes building academic and learning experiences that bring knowledge, culture, wellbeing and lived experience into conversation.
Nana is particularly interested in questions such as:
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How does culture shape the way we understand and practice leadership?
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How do identity, history, and lived experience influence our behavior?
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What can the body tell us about stress, belonging, and change?
Her work is ultimately grounded in a simple idea: People are not separate from the systems they create. To understand leadership, we have to understand people. And to understand people, we have to listen not only to their words, but to their stories, their cultures, their relationships, and their bodies.
Nana has been recognized as the Tony Elumelu Foundation Entrepreneur of the Year (2020) and has been featured by CNN, BBC World News, Travel Noire, TEDx Accra and O, The Oprah Magazine. She was also invited to a 2023 White House roundtable with leading Ghanaian businesswomen during Vice President Kamala Harris’s visit to Ghana.
She holds a B.A. from Columbia University and a J.D. from American University and is a registered RYT-500 yoga practitioner.