Lois Ellen Frank is an American food historian, cookbook author, culinary anthropologist, and educator. She won a 2003 James Beard Foundation Award for her cookbook Foods of the Southwest Indian Nations, the first cookbook of Native American cuisine so honored. Early life Frank was born in New York City. She claims Kiowa descent from her mother's side and Sephardic Jewish from her father's side. Frank's paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Barazani Frank of Brooklyn, was descended from a Sephardi family who fled the Spanish Inquisition and settled in Ottoman Turkey, then made aliyah to Palestine (region), and then migrated to New York City through Ellis Island in 1915. Education Frank attended culinary school and then attended the Brooks Institute, graduating with a degree in photography in 1985. She earned a master's in cultural anthropology in 1999 with a thesis connecting indigenous tribes throughout the Americas on the basis of their use of corn. She earned her PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of New Mexico, submitting her dissertation on "The Discourse and Practice of Native American Cuisine: Native American Chefs and Native American Cooks in Contemporary Southwest Kitchens". Career During college Frank worked as a cook at the first Good Earth restaurant. After graduation she worked in the advertising industry, photographing commercial shoots for Evian, Taco Bell and International House of Pancakes. A mentor, Ernst Haas, questioned the meaningfulness of her work and encouraged her to explore her heritage. She had a "moment of reckoning", realizing she was "making food that I wouldn't even eat look beautiful, and then promoting others to eat it". In the 1980s, she started asking questions about Native American cuisine and "was told there was no such thing". She told The New York Times: "But of course they had a cuisine, and it was intricate, diverse and delicious". Around the same time she met Juanita Tiger Kavena, who had written Hopi Cookery (1980), one of the first cookbooks by a Native American cook. In 1991 she proposed a book on Native American cuisine to publishers in New York. "They told me that Native people didn't have a cuisine", she recalled in a 2013 interview, "and that I didn't have the credentials to write any such book". She returned to school to earn her master's degree and a doctorate in cultural anthropology, and recalls that "at the time, they were teaching that American cuisine was made up