Travels from New York, USA
Padma Lakshmi's speaking fee falls within range: Over $75,000
Emmy-nominated Padma Lakshmi may be best-known for her role as host on Top Chef, but offscreen she has had far reaching influence as a societal changemaker.
Lakshmi is the co-founder of The Endometriosis Foundation of America which works to increase awareness and research of a disease that affects 200 million women worldwide, including Lakshmi, who was bedridden 25% of the year from age 13 onward due to the condition. Her foundation was a key force in opening the MIT Center for Gynepathology Research. Additionally, she is an ACLU ambassador, an ambassador for Keep a Child Alive, and a Goodwill Ambassador in the United Nations Development Program.
Lakshmi was the first Indian model to break into an international career. She used the money to pay off her college loans and branched out into acting, producing, and writing. She is the author of the the best-selling food memoir, Love, Loss and What We Ate.
Emmy-nominated Padma Lakshmi is internationally known as a food expert, model, actress and best-selling author, as well as the recipient of the 2016 NECO Ellis Island Medal of Honor and Variety’s 2018 Karma award. Lakshmi serves as host and an executive producer of Bravo’s Emmy award-winning Top Chef, which is currently in its 16th season.
Lakshmi established herself as a food expert early in her career, having hosted two successful cooking shows and writing the best-selling Easy Exotic, which won the “Best First Book” award at the 1999 Gourmand World Cookbook Awards. Lakshmi followed this success with the publication of her second cookbook, Tangy, Tart, Hot & Sweet. In 2016, she released her food memoir, The New York Times best-selling Love, Loss and What We Ate, which also won “Best Lifestyle, Body & Soul” at the 2017 Gourmand World Cookbook Awards, followed by The Encyclopedia of Spices & Herbs.
In addition to her work as a writer, Lakshmi is a savvy businesswoman, having had multiple companies of her own, including her home décor line, The Padma Collection, and Padma’s Easy Exotic, a collection of frozen rices, lentils and other culinary products. In Spring of 2018, Padma collaborated with MAC Cosmetics for a worldwide capsule collection called #MACPadma.
Last year, Lakshmi became an ambassador for the ACLU, focusing on women’s reproductive health and immigration issues. She is also co-founder of the Endometriosis Foundation of America. The EFA has educated over 32,000 teens on this devastating illness. In the fall of 2018, Padma was named a Visiting Scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
TV host and women’s health advocate, Padma Lakshmi takes on the historic inequality that the medical community has shown toward women’s health issues in terms of a lack of funding and understanding. She discusses her own journey with endometriosis, how it left her debilitated one week per month, and how doctors told her she simply had a low pain tolerance and would have to deal with it.
In response, Padma co-founded The Endometriosis Foundation of America and over the past ten years has been working to raise awareness, medical understanding, and funding of a condition that is much more common than most people realize. “Our government only spends $7-11 million dollars a year on endometriosis research a year, even though it costs our system $21 billion,” she points out. “Never mind giving a damn about our health - that’s just bad business.”
Model, producer, and TV host, Padma Lakshmi is a trailblazer at putting difficult subjects in women’s health in the national spotlight. Lakshmi has been a featured keynote speaker at several institutes and events that center on women’s health and leadership, including MIT, the ACLU, and the United Nation's Women Empowerment Forum. Her transparency on her battle with endometriosis and her experience with sexual assault is destigmatizing these issues and empowering audiences across the nation.
“Padma was an absolute delight onsite. She was so accommodating during the photo opp/ meet & greet and her commentary during the Q&A was really thoughtful and provided a lot of value for the audience. The client and audience absolutely loved her.” -Charles Schwab
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Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir
A vivid memoir of food and family, survival and triumph, Love, Loss, and What We Ate traces the arc of Padma Lakshmi’s unlikely path from an immigrant childhood to a complicated life in front of the camera—a tantalizing blend of Ruth Reichl’s Tender at the Bone and Nora Ephron’s Heartburn
Long before Padma Lakshmi ever stepped onto a television set, she learned that how we eat is an extension of how we love, how we comfort, how we forge a sense of home—and how we taste the world as we navigate our way through it. Shuttling between continents as a child, she lived a life of dislocation that would become habit as an adult, never quite at home in the world. And yet, through all her travels, her favorite food remained the simple rice she first ate sitting on the cool floor of her grandmother’s kitchen in South India.
Poignant and surprising, Love, Loss, and What We Ate is Lakshmi’s extraordinary account of her journey from that humble kitchen, ruled by ferocious and unforgettable women, to the judges’ table of Top Chef and beyond. It chronicles the fierce devotion of the remarkable people who shaped her along the way, from her headstrong mother who flouted conservative Indian convention to make a life in New York, to her Brahmin grandfather—a brilliant engineer with an irrepressible sweet tooth—to the man seemingly wrong for her in every way who proved to be her truest ally. A memoir rich with sensual prose and punctuated with evocative recipes, it is alive with the scents, tastes, and textures of a life that spans complex geographies both internal and external..
The Encyclopedia of Spices and Herbs: An Essential Guide to the Flavors of the World
From the Emmy-nominated host of the award-winning Top Chef, an A-to-Z compendium of spices, herbs, salts, peppers, and blends, with beautiful photography and a wealth of explanation, history, and cooking advice.
Award-winning cookbook author and television host Padma Lakshmi, inspired by her life of traveling across the globe, brings together the world’s spices and herbs in a vibrant, comprehensive alphabetical guide. This definitive culinary reference book is illustrated with rich color photographs that capture the essence of a diverse range of spices and their authentic flavors. The Encyclopedia of Spices and Herbs includes complete descriptions, histories, and cooking suggestions for ingredients from basic herbs to the most exotic seeds and chilies, as well as information on toasting spices, making teas, and infusing various oils and vinegars. And no other market epitomizes Padma’s love for spices and global cuisine than where she spent her childhood—lingering in the aisles of the iconic gourmet food store Kalustyan’s, in New York City.
Tangy Tart Hot and Sweet: A World of Recipes for Every Day As host of Bravo’s popular Top Chef, Padma reaches millions of viewers each week and returns to the page with recipes for sophisticated international cuisine that are easy to prepare. Inspired by her travels to some of the most secluded corners of the planet, Padma shares with cooks the origins of her latest exotic recipes. But you’ll never have to feel as though you’ve just traveled the world in order to prepare them. Padma makes it simple to impress your guests with more than two hundred elegant and savory dishes such as Hot and Sour Fruit Chaat, Tangy Jicama Salad, Purée of Roasted Aubergine, Couscous with Merguez Sausage, South Indian Spinach and Lentil Soup, Red Snapper with Green Apple and Mint Chutney, Roasted Citrus Chicken, Barbecue Korean Short Ribs, and Honeycomb Ice Cream. From appetizers to entrées, soups to desserts–Tangy Tart Hot & Sweet is the perfect book for anyone who wants cooking to be easy, elegant, and unforgettable.
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