Padma Parvati Lakshmi (; born September 1, 1970) is an Indian-born American author, activist, actress, model, philanthropist, and television host. She has hosted the cooking competition program Top Chef on Bravo continuously since season 2 (2006). For her work, she received a Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Reality Host in 2009 and 2020 through 2022. She is also the creator, host, and executive producer of the critically-acclaimed docuseries Taste the Nation with Padma Lakshmi, which premiered in June 2020 on Hulu and explores the food and culture of immigrant and indigenous communities across America. In 2022, Taste the Nation: Holiday Edition won a James Beard Foundation Award in the Visual Media - Long Form category. She has published six books: two cookbooks, Easy Exotic and Tangy, Tart, Hot & Sweet; an encyclopedia, The Encyclopedia of Spices & Herbs: An Essential Guide to the Flavors of the World; a memoir, Love, Loss, and What We Ate; a children's book, Tomatoes for Neela illustrated by Juana Martinez-Neal, and guest-edited The Best American Travel Writing 2021. Early life Padma Parvati Lakshmi was born in Madras (now Chennai), India, into a Tamil Brahmin family. Her mother Vijaya is a retired oncology nurse. Her parents divorced when she was two years old. Lakshmi immigrated to the United States at age four and was raised in New York City before moving to La Puente, California with her mother and stepfather. As a teenager growing up in Los Angeles, she stated that she was bullied and endured Anti-Indian racism, which caused her to struggle to overcome "internalized self-loathing." In 1984, when Lakshmi was 14 years old, she was hospitalized for three weeks and eventually diagnosed with Stevens–Johnson syndrome, a rare illness caused by hypersensitivity to an infection or a potentially fatal reaction to certain kinds of medications. Two days after her discharge from the hospital, she was injured in a car accident in Malibu, California, which left her with a fractured right hip and a shattered right upper arm. The arm injury required surgery, from which she retained a seven-inch scar between her elbow and shoulder. In a 2018 essay for The New York Times, Lakshmi revealed that she was raped by her older boyfriend when she was 16, which she did not report. She stated that her decision to keep silent about the rape resulted from her stepfather‘s relative assaulting her when she was seven years