Based in Ghana, Nana Amoako-Anin is a US-born Ghanaian lawyer, leadership strategist, thought leader and wellness educator. She is widely recognized as a pioneer in West Africa's modern wellness movement and an advocate for decolonizing wellness practices. She believes the body is the only form of data that we need to inform us.
Her career resists easy categorization, and that is precisely the point.
She started as an artist. At Columbia University, she studied art, drawn to the way creative practice asks people to see what is actually in front of them, not what they expect to find.
And then, as an educator, after graduating from Columbia, she took that instinct into the classroom, teaching art in New York City. She was trying to do what good teachers do: help young people find a language for what they already know.
Trained in law, it was in NYC that her path took a dynamic turn. After law school, she was appointed to the Manhattan District Attorney's Office as an Assistant District Attorney. Being also shaped by practice in finance, civic life, and the arts, Nana has spent over two decades building and advising organizations at their most complex inflection points: rapid growth, cultural breakdown, leadership fatigue, and the particular pressure of building something new in a context where few templates exist.
Widely known as the founder of Bliss Yoga Accra, one of Ghana's 1st yoga studios, for over 13 years, she has curated over 10,000 hours of wellness industry-enabling teacher-training modalities with diverse faculty, having graduated close to 150 teachers advocating beyond student metrics. Her research platform, Wellness in Black, is an intellectual initiative exploring somatic and nervous-system-informed approaches to wellbeing in African and diasporic contexts. She is Chief People and Culture Officer at CrowdReason GH for one of Ghana's emerging AI tech platforms. Through her work with the Touch A Life Foundation, she extended her civic commitment to community care, education and access.
With a clear intention to engage universities and public audiences, her conceptual framework is built on three propositions: that culture is infrastructure, not ornamentation; that the body holds data that institutions routinely ignore; and that the most generative site of work is the gap between what exists and what is needed, between inherited systems and emergent ones.
Her work has taken her far. In 2020 the Tony Elumelu Foundation named her Entrepreneur of the Year. In 2023, she was invited by the Biden/Harris White House, during their historic trip to Accra, to a roundtable of 6 leading Ghanaian businesswomen convened to address the future of entrepreneurship on the continent.
Her entrepreneurial journey has earned her features in prominent media outlets, including CNN, BBC World News, Travel Noire, TEDx Accra, & Oprah (O) Magazine.
She holds a B.A. from Columbia University, a J.D. from American University, and is a licensed RYT-500 yoga practitioner.