Sean Sherman, Founder, CEO, and Chef

Sean Sherman, Oglala Lakota Sioux, was born in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, and has cooked across the U.S. and around the world for the last thirty years.  His focus is on revitalizing Indigenous food systems within the context of modern culinary systems. To accomplish his goal he studied the foundations of Indigenous food systems, Native American farming and cooking techniques, migration histories, wild food harvesting and usage, and food preservation.

In 2014, Sean opened The Sioux Chef, a catering and food education company. In 2015, he helped design and open the Tatanka Food Truck featuring pre-contact foods of the Dakota and Minnesota territories. Sean has presented dinners at the James Beard House in Manhattan and the James Beard American Restaurant in Milan and has taught at Yale University, the Culinary Institute of America, and the United Nations. He received the 2015 First Peoples Fund Fellowship, 2018 Bush Foundation Fellowship, National Center’s 2018 First American Entrepreneurship Award, 2018 James Beard Award for Best American Cookbook, and a 2019 James Beard Leadership Award.

The Sioux Chef team works to make Indigenous foods accessible to as many communities as possible. To create opportunities for people to learn about Native cuisine and to develop food enterprises in their tribal communities, Sean and his team founded the nonprofit North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems (NATIFS) which will oversee the first Indigenous Food Lab restaurant and training center in Minneapolis.