Lois Ellen Frank

Lois Ellen Frank is an American chef with Red Mesa Cuisine, LLC in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her work is rooted in Indigenous Cuisine and Cultural Education, with a focus on the revitalization of ancestral Native American cuisine. At Red Mesa Cuisine, she cooks alongside Chef Walter Whitewater, and the company specializes in Native American cuisine. Frank has built a career that moves across the kitchen, the classroom, and cultural advocacy, bringing those roles into close conversation with one another.

She works as an adjunct professor of the Institute of American Indian Arts, a culinary instructor at Santa Fe School of Cooking, a consultant of Cultural Conservancy, a Culinary Ambassador Diplomat of the United States Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, and a workshop leader and program collaborator of Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. She is also the founder and operator of Red Mesa Cuisine.

Across these roles, her work centers on teaching, preserving, and sharing Native American cuisine in ways that honor both tradition and continuity. Frank studied at the University of New Mexico. Her early experiences in the kitchen and behind the camera helped shape a professional life built on observation, precision, and storytelling. In the kitchen, she learned the discipline of timing, flavor, and service. Behind the camera, she developed an eye for composition, detail, and the power of an image to carry a message.

Those experiences informed her ability to move between food, education, and broader cultural work. Her career also includes work as a cook at the first Good Earth restaurant and as a photographer in the advertising industry. These experiences contributed to a path that has never remained in one lane for long, and they continue to inform the breadth of her present work. Frank’s approach treats cuisine as a living archive, with food serving as a vessel for knowledge, remembrance, and exchange.

Her signature dishes include Foods of the Southwest Indian Nations, reflecting a body of work grounded in place, season, and the culinary traditions of Native communities in the Southwest Indian Nations. She has said that her work focuses on Indigenous Cuisine and Cultural Education and on the revitalization of ancestral Native American cuisine. That mission runs through her teaching, her cooking, and her public advocacy, keeping Native American cuisine accessible through both practice and instruction. Frank has received the Krider Prize for Creativity from UCDA Foundation and the James Beard Foundation Award for Foods of the Southwest Indian Nations.