Remembering Sheana Davis: Cheese, Community & Fighter for Justice
Editor's note: I met award-winning cheesemaker Sheana Davis in 2018, and we instantly became friends. When Cheese Professor launched, she became a contributor, an inside source, a connector, and a relentless supporter. We are grateful for everything she did and the genuinely wonderful person she was. Sheana passed away on October 12, 2026, at age 57.
Sheana Davis photo courtesy of Epicurean Connection
The first time I traveled with Sheana Davis we didn’t know where we were going. We were in Louisville, Kentucky for the 2001 American Cheese Society Conference. Neither of us knew too many people in the larger cheese world at that point and we were far from home.
We had heard that there was a really interesting restaurant where the chef was combining his Romani and Mexican heritage, but we didn’t know the name or location. This was before smartphones, so we were driving around what we thought was the neighborhood and looking, unsuccessfully, for a likely target. Finally, we saw a place called Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves. Since “Gypsy” is a slur for Romani it caught our attention. An Ironic name?
We entered and it was clear we were not in the place we were looking for. It was a huge LGBTQ bar, just opened for the day and almost empty beyond a bartender and a couple of regulars eyeing us suspiciously. Here we were, clearly out-of-towners looking like a heterosexual couple invading their space. Sheana made things even more awkward at first, asking if they had any local micro-brews. Confused, someone said the Budweiser brewery was just fifteen or twenty miles down the road. We ordered Buds and sat down.
Thanks mostly to Sheana, within ten minutes we were all best friends, the locals were invited to a hotel room cheese party we were hosting the next day, they told us about a great, unpretentious BBQ place just a block away, and Sheana promised one person a tour of Sonoma wineries if they ever got out to California.
Summing up Sheana is impossible. She did too much. She touched too many people. She did so many helpful things for the right reasons that no one person could catalog them all. I will mostly stick to her impact on the cheese world here, but there are so many tidbits of good deeds that I keep getting distracted by a new fact. Oh, she donated electric kettles to low-income seniors in her community for fire safety? She was instrumental in getting a sidewalk constructed on a street that was unsafe for pedestrians? She ran a “No Pay Café” during the worst months of COVID? All true facts, not surprising if you knew her.
A Community Builder
Sheana Davis, Gordon Edgar and Sarah Marcus
I chose the Louisville anecdote above – out of many possible stories – because at her core Sheana was a community builder; a world-enlarger. Everyone was included until they gave her a reason not to be. “Sheana taught cheesemaking to Michelin chefs and single parents on WIC/SNAP with the same passion. She wanted to share,” said her husband and business partner, Ben Sessions.
Emi Lee, a Board Member of the American Cheese Society, told of being invited as a stranger to another of Sheana’s unofficial conference hotel room cheese parties, “(The invitation) inspired me to be as welcoming, accepting, and supportive of others in the food industry, especially to the younger misfits as we'd been ourselves. It can seem like such a big, overwhelming, and intimidating place; but you just need one person to hold your hand and light the paths ahead. That's a treasure Sheana helped give me.”
Chris Osburne of Blackberry Farm, who collaborated with Sheana on a one-off Sonoma/Tennessee cheese, wrote, “(T)he cheese community has suffered a great loss. Someone who hustled and worked to make the industry a better place. Someone who left their community and profession a better place than they found it.”
A Connector
Ben Sessions and Sheana Davis
Sheana did many things in the food world. She was trained as a chef. She represented many California cheese companies. She put on (with cheese legend Ig Vella) a Sonoma Valley Cheese Conference for years. She ran (with the help of her husband Ben Sessions and daughter Karina) the Epicurean Connection. She taught cheesemaking classes. She made cheese and butter. She wrote a book with her daughter called Buttermonger.
However, those resume points, while impressive, tell less about Sheana than the less recognized, more intangible things she prided herself on. She connected people who would not have been otherwise connected, and she did it because she believed in the power of people.
“Sheana Davis came to work with me and my late husband, Steven Schack, in the 1990s as we introduced goat milk cheeses to our product line at Redwood Hill Farm. She was so helpful in the transition of the business after Steven’s death from pancreatic cancer,” said Jennifer Bice of Redwood Hill Farm and Green Valley Creamery. “(All her work was) based on the premise that we can all make a difference in our own way.”
Bob Wills, owner of the environmentally-innovative Cedar Grove Cheese in Plain, Wisconsin, wrote, “I hope the next generation has people like (legendary Wisconsin cheesemaker Willi Lehner and Sheana Davis). They were the soul and moral center that made their neighborhoods and our cheese community so supportive and powerful. During one of her festivals, Sheana suggested I go to dinner at a restaurant run by her Sherpa friends. I arrived to find it closed for a community ritual honoring the coming of age of young family members. When I mentioned Sheana's name, they embraced me and welcomed me to join the celebration. One of the groups had a brother who was a yak milk cheese producer in Nepal. He translated for me and treated me like family. Sheana opened doors and opened hearts.”
For many people this kind of story of unlikely meetings and hospitality would be a one-off anecdote, but with Sheana it represents a through-line with almost anyone that knew her. “Sheana was such a positive part of the cheese world for so many years,” wrote Ari Weinzweig, co-founding partner of Zingerman's Community of Businesses and recipient of an American Cheese Society Lifetime Achievement Award. “Her deep devotion to supporting artisan cheesemakers, her commitment to her community, her work to help really everyone who worked with traditional cheese was an inspiration for me and many hundreds of others. Her generosity of spirit contributed positively to the lives of many more.”
Sheana's Family
Sheana Davis and daughter Karina Davis
I am thankful I also got to know Sheana’s family. Her proud union-member dad would drive us to the airport for out-of-town cheese events. I often hung out with her mom in the side rooms at busy cheese events. Her sister Cas and I bonded over Sheana’s terrible sense of direction. I saw her daughter Karina grow into an incredible person. I got to see Sheana find her true love, Ben Sessions, and I attended their wedding, packed with an odd assortment of the most awesome people you’d ever want to meet.
And that crowd who came to honor her really summed Sheana up. She always believed a new friend was around the corner, and she collected good people.
"I want to find ways to carry on her funky spirit. To really uphold her memory and drive to connect people. (My Mom) was very intentional, non-judgmental, inclusive, and to the point. She would not hesitate to call and start a new project or conversation with the people who earned her trust."
Indeed, she insisted on it. As cheesemaker Chris Roelli of Roelli Cheese Haus said, “(Sheana was) always one to want to help someone out, in the most undeniable way. She didn’t take no for an answer.”
A Fighter for All the Right Things
Delice de la Valee, an award winning cheese crafted by Sheana Davis photo credit Sheana Davis
At her core, Sheana was a fighter. She fought off cancer a couple of decades ago. She was also a believer in social justice and fought for what she believed was right. I watched her immediately drop a popular product when she saw the owner of the company speaking out against a Sonoma living wage ordinance. When Sheana saw a moral imperative, she had no fear of the consequences of doing what she thought was right.
“Sheana fought the good fight all the way to the end,” says Doralice Handel veteran of the cheese industry and current owner of Locals Tasting Room. “She was really feeling the effects of all the medicine when I saw her in July but continued to do everything she loved to do. She did lament that she was starting to have her doubts if she could beat it. That made me sad. She was really something! Multi-talented, full of piss and vinegar. Just a great human.”
A Life Well Lived
I have blown past the normal word count for a piece like this but have left out so much. Every person I have talked to about Sheana since her death – even though I had often worked with them for decades, even though I knew Sheana for over thirty years – told me something I didn’t know. No obituary is ever complete, of course… but when writing about Sheana, it feels more incomplete than most. I can feel the energy of hundreds, maybe thousands, of people on their screens, reading this and bursting to tell the world one of their Sheana stories: an unsung good deed, a burst of inspiration, a moment of moral outrage, a night out so hilarious that it was difficult to explain the next day.
The best summation of Sheana I heard may have been from her long-time friend, Kiersten Elzy. “The best way to honor Sheana? Lend a hand to someone else.”
Sheana lived a shorter life than anyone wanted for her, but if that is what people think when they remember you, then you made the most of the time you had here. Goodbye, Sheana. We thank you for everything you did to make the world a better place.