2008, Penn served as a visiting lecturer in Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His course was titled "Images of Asian Americans in the Media". In 2014, Penn was working on a graduate certificate in international security from Stanford University. On January 2, 2017, Penn won the "MasterChef Celebrity Showdown" and donated the $25,000 cash prize to UNRWA, a United Nations relief and human development agency that supports Palestinian refugees. On January 28, 2017, following a racist comment from a user on Penn's Twitter feed, Penn crowd-funded a fundraiser for refugees of the Syrian Civil War and raised $813,533. This occurred during President Donald Trump's Executive Order 13769, which banned immigration to the United States from Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Iran, Iraq, Libya, and Somalia regardless of visa status. Personal life In October 2021, while promoting his memoir, You Can’t Be Serious, Penn announced that he and his boyfriend of 11 years, named Josh, were engaged to be married. In regard to his sexual orientation, Penn said that he had "discovered [his] own sexuality as gay relatively late in life compared to many other people." However, he feels that "there's no timeline on this stuff. People figure their shit out at different times in their lives, so I'm glad I did when I did." Filmography Film Television See also Indians in the New York City metropolitan area LGBT people from New York City References External links Office of Public Engagement 1977 births 20th-century American male actors 21st-century American male actors American male film actors American male television actors American comedians of Indian descent American civil servants American actor-politicians American male actors of Indian descent American people of Gujarati descent American Hindus Freehold Township High School alumni Howell High School (New Jersey) alumni LGBT appointed officials in the United States LGBT Hindus LGBT male actors LGBT people from New Jersey American LGBT people of Asian descent Living people Male actors from New Jersey New Jersey Democrats Obama administration personnel People from Freehold Township, New Jersey People from Marlboro Township, New Jersey Stanford University alumni University of California, Los Angeles alumni Competitive debaters