Based in Ghana, Nana Amoako-Anin is a people and culture strategist, wellness educator, somatic researcher, and institution builder whose work sits at the intersection of organizational systems, embodied knowledge, and African intellectual traditions.
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. After graduating 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.
She is the founder of Wellness in Black, a research and practice initiative exploring somatic and nervous-system-informed approaches to wellbeing in African and diasporic contexts, and of Bliss Yoga Accra, where she trains yoga teachers through a 200-hour certification programme rooted in African embodied knowledge. As Chief People and Culture Officer at CrowdReason GH, she leads organizational culture design for one of Ghana's emerging tech platforms. Through Touch A Life Ghana, she extended her civic commitment to community care education and access. 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.
She has delivered academic lectures including a PhD-level address on decolonizing wellness drawing on theorists across African studies, critical theory, and somatic practice.
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 White House in Accra for a roundtable of six 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 yoga practitioner.