Background / The Longer Story
Dana's family were entrepreneurs, second-generation South African on her parents' side, with immigrant grandparents. Her mother ran two companies that fed into each other: a wholesale travel business and a separate retail travel agency. Dana was often pulled out of school to travel with her mother, going from venue to venue as her mother put together family tour packages, with Dana along as a kid guinea pig for the itineraries. Her father ran an import-export business, sourcing goods primarily from the EU and Nordic countries and distributing them throughout South Africa; Dana traveled with him too. After school and during holidays her babysitting was often working in her father's warehouse or in her mother's office, and as a teen, her grandfather's retail shop. It amounted to an MBA learned at her parents' knees, inside an entrepreneurial system rather than a classroom.
At the height of apartheid, in 1986, the family moved to the US, ostensibly for university but really to extend the South African family business, which took root in Manhattan. Dana was sixteen. The values she carried out of that upbringing were plain: gratitude for what you have, hard work, and treating the people you work with exactly as you'd wish to be treated yourself.
Dana's roots are in Bay Area startup culture from the 1990s onward, a self-described "startup junkie" present at the birth of multiple industries rather than a corporate climber. Her chosen path and work had her nomadic before it became a norm, instilling resourcefulness and resilience. Rather than pursuing an advanced degree in her twenties, she decided, until her mid-30s, to self-curate her own PhD through direct experience, prioritising learning, network, and service over income, a choice UC Berkeley later validated by offering her the very thing she'd built for herself. Even earlier, as a student, she worked for a dean at Yale, which opened access to classes and campus life she couldn't otherwise afford: an early, subtle version of the same self-curated path.
At UC Berkeley, the Dean of the College of Natural Resources met her as an ambassador at World Environment Week and created a role for her as his special advisor, to build bridges, domestically and internationally. Her time at Berkeley came to a close when she had to step back to focus on conquering cancer. She was a founding contributor to the Berkeley Energy and Resources Collective (BERC), and later became a Certified Health and Wellness Coach through the Institute of Functional Medicine in 2015.
Many years later, after her cancer diagnosis and treatment, she completed a stint at the University of Cape Town's medical school, leading a discovery to market from a synthetic biology lab.
She spent years with the Business & Development Network (BiD Network, Netherlands), helping impact businesses across the world funded by the Dutch lottery. She has deep ties to South Africa's post-apartheid transition, including proximity to Nelson Mandela, Helen Suzman, and Walter Sisulu. She is a member of the Bioneers community, at the intersection of biology and engineering, and has volunteered her mid-Atlantic voice for climate, environmental, and human rights films.
With Nelson Mandela, and with Helen Suzman.
Through the Path to Health Clinic, she partnered with Habitat for Humanity's and organised a volunteer team to build a home for Lulama Goma, a colleague living in a shanty in the townships. Today she is co-founder of Path to Health Centre in Cape Town and the PATH Method, born from her own healing journey; Principal of Regenerative Lab, a collective advisory practice; creator of Re-Enliven, storytelling and documentary work in integrative health; and consulting producer on an upcoming US documentary working with a global production team.
