Foundation Hero Award

2023 Hero Award Winner

Sunu P. Chandy (she/her) is a social justice activist through her work as a poet and a civil rights attorney. Sunu is a queer woman of color and her parents are immigrants from Kerala, India. Sunu currently lives in Washington DC with her spouse, Erika, and their middle schooler, Satya. Sunu’s collection of poems, My Dear Comrades, was selected for the 2021 Terry J. Cox Prize, and published by Regal House in March 2023. Her work can also be found in Asian American Literary Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Poets on Adoption, Split this Rock’s online social justice database, The Quarry, and in anthologies including The Penguin Book of Indian Poets, The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood and This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation.

Sunu also serves as the legal director for the National Women’s Law Center. At NWLC she guides litigation including direct cases and amicus briefs and thereby provides strategies to create better outcomes for women and girls including in schools, workplaces, and the healthcare sector. She also supports the Center's LGBTQI+ rights related work, and has provided Congressional testimony in support of the Equality Act. Sunu also serves on the board of the Transgender Law Center. Before joining NWLC, Sunu was the Deputy Director for the Civil Rights Division with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and before that, she was the General Counsel of the DC Office of Human Rights (OHR). Previously, Sunu was a federal attorney with the U.S. Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) for 15 years. At EEOC, in addition to litigating civil rights cases, Sunu led several outreach initiatives including as a member of the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (WHIAPPI) Regional Working Group. Sunu began her legal career as a law firm associate representing unions and individual workers in New York City.

Sunu earned her B.A. in Peace and Global Studies/Women’s Studies from Earlham College, her law degree from Northeastern University School of Law and later, her MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Queens College/The City University of New York. Sunu was honored as one of the 2021 Queer Women of Washington and one of Go Magazine’s 100 Women We Love: Class Of 2019.

2022 Hero Award Winner

Manjusha Kulkarni is a long time activist and Executive Director of Executive Director of Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council (A3PCON). Manjusha is a strong leader in the South Asian American community and building ties within the overall Asian American community. She has connections to South Asian Network (SAN), where she had previously served as Executive Director. As a co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate, Manjusha was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2021.

2020-2021 Hero Award Winner

Nisha Ganatra is the recipient of the 2021 Foundation Hero Award. A filmmaker known for her singular and authentic vision, Nisha was awarded the Cannes Lions Grand Prix for Film Craft: Direction for her film that stormed onto the scene: #wombstories. She directed the Sundance hit film Late Night starring Emma Thompson and Mindy Kaling. Late Night sold in a record-breaking deal and garnered the highest streaming numbers of the year for Amazon. She followed Late Night with the Working Title and Focus Features film: The High Note starring Tracee Ellis Ross and Dakota Johnson. Nisha was recently ranked the #1 director globally by Cannes, an honor only one other woman has achieved.

Ganatra, whose work is always in service to giving voice to the underrepresented, is excited about making new films that align with her creative and social impact values. Nisha has been creating emotional, authentic and humorous stories since her debut feature Chutney Popcorn by infusing her keen sense of comedy and storytelling with her personal life experience and point of view.

2019 Hero award winner

Maulik Pancholy is the 2019 recipient of Foundation's Hero Award. He is an actor, writer, and activist who is a long-time advocate for the AAPI and LGBTQI communities and is the co-founder of Act to Change, an anti-bullying organization. As an actor, he is known for playing Jonathan on NBC’s award-winning comedy 30 Rock, Sanjay on the Showtime hit series Weeds, and Neal on the NBC comedy Whitney. His debut novel, The Best At It, was released in Fall 2019.

2018 Hero Award Winner

Hari Kondabolu is a Brooklyn-based, Queens-raised comic who the NY Times has called "one of the most exciting political comics in stand-up today." In March 2014, he released his debut standup album "Waiting for 2042" on indie-label Kill Rock Stars. He was NYU's APA Institute's "Artist in Residence" for the 2014-2015 Academic Year. Hari has done standup on the Late Show with David Letterman, Conan, Jimmy Kimmel Live, Live at Gotham and John Oliver's New York Standup Show. He attended both Bowdoin College and Wesleyan University, graduating from the former institution in 2004. A former immigrant rights organizer in Seattle, Hari also earned a Masters in Human Rights from the London School of Economics in 2008, writing a merit- earning dissertation entitled "Mexican Returnees as Internally Displaced People: An Argument for the Protection of Economic Migrants Under the UN Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement."