Asian Women’s Leadership Forum

A festival I put on sophomore, junior, and senior year at Saint Ann’s School, where I invited a myriad of accomplished Asian women to speak to students about their career and origins in the hopes of inspiring and educating a younger generation about possible career paths.

*For the privacy of the children who attended the festival, their faces have been blurred.

Parul Sehgal is a critic at large for The New York Times. She was previously a staff writer at The New Yorker and a book critic for The Times, where she also worked as a columnist. She won the 2025 National Magazine Award for criticism; her other honors include awards from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, the New York Press Club, and the National Book Critics Circle. She teaches in the graduate writing program at New York University.

Snigdha Sur is the founder & CEO of The Juggernaut, a Y Combinator and Precursor Ventures-backed media company telling smart South Asian stories and news. They pride ourselves in telling untold context.
She’s worked at McKinsey New York, in Bollywood, in media-focused venture capital/PE, in product/marketing at an Indian video streaming company, and in launch strategy for Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine. She has also advised BuzzFeed, Quartz, and Scroll.in.
She graduated from Harvard Business School as a Baker Scholar with an MBA and magna cum laude from Yale College in Economics and South Asian Studies. She is fluent in Hindi and Bengali and sometimes can slip into Mandarin.

Amrutha Vasan is the Co-Founder and COO of Inspirit, where she leads operations and has built and scaled teams in both India and the US. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree (2022), she has played a key role in positioning Inspirit as a leader in immersive education, winning the SXSW EDU Launch competition and being named a top 10 EdTech company by ASU GSV.
Amrutha also serves on the board of the non-profit Women’s Education Project. She holds a degree in Industrial & Systems Engineering from Georgia Tech and has a background in immersive STEM education research.

Mitra Kalita is an award-winning veteran journalist, media executive, prolific commentator, and author of two books. At the height of the pandemic, Mitra founded two media companies to ensure communities of color are served, supported, and centered: The first, Epicenter-NYC, which started as a newsletter to help New Yorkers get through Covid, is now a community journalism multiplatform company, and URL Media, a growing network of Black and Brown owned media organizations that share content, distribution, and revenues to increase their long-term viability. She’s on the board of the Philadelphia Inquirer, has written a regular workplace column for Time/Charter, was a consultant for season 3 of The Morning Show on Apple TV, and is a co-producer on the documentary, Vice is Broke. Before launching her companies, Mitra served as SVP at CNN Digital, overseeing the national news, breaking news, programming, opinion, and features teams. Her media background also spans the LA Times, where she was managing editor, Wall Street Journal, Quartz, and the Washington Post. Mitra lives in Jackson Heights with her husband, the artist Nitin Mukul, two daughters, and two mutts.

Jiwon Choi is a poet who struggles to identify and name emotions that remain unnamed and unrevealed from childhood experiences and traumas in order to become the fully actualized human she knows she can be. Choi is the author of One Daughter is Worth Ten Sons and I Used To Be Korean, and her third poetry collection, A Temporary Dwelling, will come out in June 2024. She started her community garden’s first poetry reading series, Poets Read in the Garden, to support local writers during the early Covid years. She is also Co-editor at Hanging Loose Press. You can find out more about her at iusedtobekorean.com.

Joo Han
Joo Han is the deputy director at the Asian American Federation (AAF), an umbrella leadership organization that represents the collective voice of 70 community-based organizations serving over 1.5 million Asian Americans, the fastest-growing population in New York City. Founded in 1989, AAF is one of the strongest leadership voices advocating for better policies, services, and funding that lead to more justice and opportunity for Asian immigrants, one of New York City’s poorest and most underserved communities. For the past nine years, Joo has overseen a number of mental health, education, and capacity-building programs to support AAF’s 70 member agencies and to advocate for the most pressing needs of New York City’s Asian communities. Since COVID-19-related xenophobia began to impact Asian New Yorkers in January 2020, she has been leading a team to address the surge in violence targeting the Asian community through AAF’s Hope Against Hate Campaign, a community-based safety solution to bring immediate and longer-term safety to vulnerable Asian New Yorkers. In 2015, she launched a two-year, citywide community education program to address the rise in bullying of Asian American youth and the impact on their mental health. Based on that program, she shepherded a research project on the mental health needs of Asian New Yorkers, which led to the first-ever mental health report focusing on New York City’s pan-Asian community. She is currently overseeing the Asian American Mental Health Project at AAF, which aims to increase access to culturally competent mental health services for Asian New Yorkers. Joo received a B.A. in English from Williams College and a M.A. in English Education from Teachers College of Columbia University.

Ann Tran
Ann Tran, MD is a double board certified urogynecologist and obstetrician-gynecologist. She holds dual appointments as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Surgery as well as the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology. Dr. Tran completed a three-year fellowship in Urogynecology and Pelvic Reconstructive Surgery at Northwell Health in Long Island. Upon completion of her training, she joined the Faculty Practice Associates at Mount Sinai as a Urogynecologist in 2019. During this period, she developed an interest in gender affirming surgery and became committed to improving the health and wellbeing of trans and gender diverse communities. She reinforced this commitment by joining the Gender Affirmation Surgery Section of the Division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery in 2022. Dr. Tran is dedicated to teaching and mentoring trainees in her field and serves as the Assistant Program Director of the Female Pelvic Medicine and Reconstructive Surgery fellowship at Mount Sinai. She has authored numerous peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and has made numerous presentations at national meetings. Throughout her career she has consistently won teaching awards including the CREOGs National Faculty Award which recognizes excellence in resident education. Dr. Tran also volunteers her services in the Global Surgery Program at Mount Sinai which is committed to addressing the lack of surgical services available in underserved areas around the world.

Jessica Cheung joined The New York Times in 2018 after working at NPR, where she produced and reported for the podcast “All Things Considered. She currently works at the “The Daily,” a podcast focused on current events with newsroom reporters to remake their writing into audio stories. She also does her own reporting, focusing on politics and education. She has a particular interest in the ways racial and class identities are affected and shaped by the K-12 and higher education system. She grew up in San Francisco and graduated from Middlebury College in Vermont with a B.A. in English. She lives in Brooklyn.

Shahana Hanif represents the 39th Council District. She is the first Muslim woman elected to the New York City Council, and the first woman to represent the 39th District. Born and raised in District 39 to Bangladeshi immigrant parents, Shahana has spent her life fighting for working-class families and a city rooted in care, equity, and justice for all.

Sunita Vishwanath has worked for over 30 years in women’s rights and human rights organizations. In 2001 she co-founded the international women’s human rights organization, Women for Afghan Women (WAW) and served as Board Chair of WAW until January 2022. She also co-founded Hindu’s for Human Rights in June 2019, and cofounded ABAAD: Afghan Women Forward.

Suyin So is a graduate of Brown University and Georgetown University Law Center. She currently serves on the board of Montessori Day School of Brooklyn and is the immediate past president of Apex for Youth, a Manhattan Chinatown-based youth development organization.