9 South Asian women to know: from runway to boardroom to screen

Kirandeep Chahal is an Indian fashion model from Punjab who has walked for major international houses including Dior, Dries Van Noten, Rick Owens, Nina Ricci and Rokh at Paris Fashion Week and other global runways. She began her career in India’s domestic fashion‑week circuit and has since become one of the more visible South Asian women on international catwalks, often styled in high‑end European and Indian couture. Her work fits within a broader moment of South Asian‑born models gaining sustained bookings rather than one‑off appearances, signalling a shift in how South Asian bodies, features and identities are cast in global luxury fashion.

Simone Ashley, raised in the UK and of Indian Tamil heritage, is best known for her role as Kate Sharma in the Netflix series Bridgerton. Her casting in a major global period drama foregrounded a South Asian woman at the centre of a narrative that otherwise adheres to established British‑aristocratic form, without making her heritage a tokenised subplot.

Her work has been cited in conversations about South Asian women in entertainment, including by organisations dedicated to amplifying South Asian female talent in Hollywood. By positioning a South Asian woman in a role that demands both emotional range and classical acting discipline, Ashley has helped to normalise the idea that South Asian women can anchor prestige projects without those projects having to be about their identity.

Lara Raj is a South Asian American singer and member of the K‑pop girl group Katseye, a multinational act that has drawn attention for its hybrid training and global rollout strategy. Her older sister, Rhea Raj, is a singer‑songwriter in her own right, with a debut album released in 2024 and accolades that include a Songwriters Hall of Fame scholarship and the Spotify x Gold House Artist of the Year award in 2023.​

Both women operate in a transnational pop sphere where South Asian women are still underrepresented as lead performers, particularly in K‑pop and Western‑style girl‑group formats. Their presence signals a shift in how South Asian vocalists and performers are allowed to move between genres, languages and markets, rather than being confined to a single diasporic niche.​

Diya Joukani, 25 and based in Mumbai, is a fashion designer and content creator who founded DiyaDiya Studio, a label that blends Indian embroidery such as aari and zardozi with contemporary streetwear silhouettes. Her marketing strategy relies on raw, mobile‑first videos shot in Mumbai streets, where she has walked goats through lanes, ridden a JCB backhoe loader and styled selvedge denim with intricate cutdana work.

These films stage fashion within the everyday chaos of a South Asian megacity, turning street vendors, aunties and civic space into a backdrop rather than a backdrop. Because her clothes frequently sell out before campaigns peak on algorithm‑driven platforms, Joukani is effectively rewriting how South Asian streetwear brands can scale: less through glossy campaigns than through hyperlocal, character‑driven content.

Supriya Ganesh, born in 1997, is an American actress known for her role as Dr Samira Mohan on the HBO‑Max medical‑drama series The Pitt, which follows frontline staff in a Pittsburgh hospital. She played Vaidehi for the first time in the world premiere of Deepak Kumar’s play House of India at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre in 2025. The production explored South Asian diasporic identity within an American theatre setting.

By the spring of 2026, it was reported that she would be leaving The Pitt after two seasons, a move that underlines the fluidity of long‑running ensemble casts and the way South Asian women are cast within those structures rather than as permanent “representatives.” Her work in both theatre and television situates her within a crop of South Asian‑American actors who are moving between prestige network formats and stage without being typecast into a narrow range of roles.

Reshma Saujani, an American lawyer and activist of Indian Gujarati heritage, is best known as the founder of Girls Who Code, a nonprofit that aims to close the gender gap in computer science by introducing more girls and gender‑minority students to coding and technology. She has also founded Moms First, a US‑based organisation focused on structural changes for working mothers, including paid leave, affordable childcare and equitable pay.

Her podcast My So‑Called Midlife, launched in 2024, quickly entered Apple’s Top 10 chart and was named one of the year’s best new podcasts by TIME, signalling her reach beyond tech‑education circles into broader cultural conversations about women’s labour and care work. As a former attorney and Democratic organiser, Saujani brings a policy‑oriented lens to feminism, which distinguishes her from figures who frame gender equity primarily through lifestyle or personal‑brand narratives.

Payal Kapadia, born in 1986 in Mumbai, is an Indian filmmaker whose short film Afternoon Clouds was the only Indian entry selected for the 70th Cannes Film Festival in 2017. Her debut feature documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing won the Golden Eye award for best documentary at the 74th Cannes Film Festival in 2021, consolidating her position in the global art‑cinema circuit.

She is a graduate of the Film and Television Institute of India, an institution that has produced several generations of South Asian auteurs and technicians. Kapadia’s work exemplifies how South Asian‑born filmmakers are using form and archival material to interrogate memory, dissent and intimate politics, rather than conforming to market‑driven genre templates.​

Mindy Kaling, born Vera Mindy Chokalingam in 1979, is an American actress, writer, producer and author who first gained recognition as Kelly Kapoor on the NBC sitcom The Office, where she also wrote 22 episodes and was nominated for a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series.

She has since created and co‑created series such as The Mindy Project and Never Have I Ever, which place South Asian women in central, complicated roles without reducing them to cultural caricatures. As a producer and showrunner, Kaling has helped to normalise the idea that South Asian‑American women can be both the writers and the protagonists of mainstream TV, influencing how networks and streamers approach casting and writers’ rooms.

Across these nine South Asian women, the common thread is not a single “voice” but a pattern of persistence in fields where visibility has historically been uneven. They are not simply role models; they are structural players in the architecture of global culture, medicine, technology and politics, whose careers will be measured less by viral moments than by the generations of South Asian women who follow them.

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