Kaylena Bray (Seneca) - “Braiding the Sacred” Consultant
Kaylena Bray is the former Foodways Program Coordinator (2013 - 2016) and currently serves as a Foodways advisor and consultant for the “Braiding the Sacred” and “Conversations with Maize” network. Over the last 5 years, she has consulted for Indigenous-led and social entrepreneurship organizations including Ashoka, Conversations with the Earth (CWE), Indigenous Peoples Biocultural Climate Change Assessment, and the California Indian Environmental Alliance. Kaylena has spent her career working to strengthen the role of traditional ecological knowledge on climate change mitigation and agricultural food systems locally in Ecuador, Peru and the Seneca Nation; and internationally with Indigenous leaders and activists at major international events at United Nations fora. Her experience in social media includes marketing and strategy development to bring Ashoka’s Changemakers and CWE increased visibility, audience, and support. She is currently a MSc candidate in Environmental Change Management at the University of Oxford.
Lois Ellen Frank, PhD (Kiowa) - Foodways Educator/Chef
Lois Ellen Frank is a a Santa Fe, New Mexico based James Beard Award-winning author, Chef, Native American foods historian, culinary anthropologist, and photographer. Lois has spent over 20 years documenting the foods and life ways of Native American communities throughout the Southwest writing and photographing many articles and papers on the topic. She is presently working on completing her PhD on the discourse and practice of Native American cuisine, which she is planning to publish as her next book, tentatively entitled The Turquoise Plate. Lois is an adjunct professor at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), where she teaches about the anthropology of food, the ethnobotany of foods and plants of the Southwest and Traditional Arts & Ecology. She is a featured cooking instructor at the Santa Fe School of Cooking, and the chef/owner of Red Mesa Cuisine, a Santa Fe catering company where she cooks Native American, local and sustainably sourced foods and teaches about Native American foods of the Southwest Indian Nations with Diné Chef Walter Whitewater.