Dana Thompson

Dana Thompson is an American restaurateur, songwriter, and promoter of indigenous cuisine and food sovereignty. In 2022, her Minneapolis, Minnesota, restaurant Owamni won the James Beard Award for Best New Restaurant.

Early life Thompson was born in Sandstone, Minnesota, to Paul Thompson, who served as the chief of police, and Anne Felix Thompson, who was of Dakota, French, and Irish descent and worked as a homemaker.

She is a descendant of Wahpeton-Sisseton and Mdewakanton Dakota through a grandfather, Clem Felix, who worked with Paul Durand to record place names. In Sandstone, her father was investigated by the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension for a violent crime. Their family then moved to Pipestone, Minnesota where her father, still a police officer, was charged and convicted of multiple felonies. After the trial, the family moved to Hibbing, Minnesota where her mother became a registered nurse and later a delegate for the Democratic Farmer Labor Party. She left at Hibbing age 15, moved to Duluth with her mother, and eventually to Minneapolis, where she worked in the music industry and in a variety of retail organizations as a marketing and branding specialist.

Career In 2014, Thompson and Sean Sherman met at a dinner where he was preparing and speaking about indigenous foods, and she offered to become his manager. and was its chief operating officer.

In 2021, Thompson and Sherman opened Owamni in Minneapolis. In 2022 Owamni was named Best New Restaurant by the James Beard Foundation. thumb In 2024, Thompson created the social impact brand Heti (which means home in Dakota), where a percentage of revenues is going to develop housing out of Hempcrete for tribal community members.

Also in 2024, Thompson launched a company to create Indigenous food experiences called The Modern Indigenous with chef Dawn Drouillard, a direct descendant of the Grand Portage band of Ojibwe.

As of 2023, Thompson was working on a memoir about her traumatic childhood.

Personal life Thompson's romantic relationship with Sherman ended shortly after Owamni opened.

She studied guitar and songwriting in Austin, Texas.