Booking Padma Lakshmi

Padma Lakshmi Biography

Celebrity chef, author, and television personality Padma Lakshmi was born in India in 1970. Lakshmi spent her early years growing up in the Chennai area of the country, until as a teenager she moved with her mother to California following her parents divorce.

Padma describes her teenage years as frustrating and challenging; she suffered at the hands of bullies during her high school years in Los Angeles and spent time split between her grandparents home in Chennai and her mother in the United States. After graduating from high school, Lakshmi earned her B.A. in Theater Arts from Clark University in Massachusetts. A study abroad program in Madrid brought her beauty to the attention of modeling agents in Europe, and so she began modeling for such high-profile designers as Ralph Lauren, Gianni Versace, and Giorgio Armani in her early twenties.

In 1999, Parma Lakshmi published her first cookbook, Easy Exotic, and it immediately became an award-winning culinary publication. The Food Network offered her a series of her own, Padma’s passport, in the early 2000’s, where she shared various recipes from around the globe. Additional Food Network specials followed, until in 2006 she joined the judging panel of the network’s hit reality show competition, Top Chef. The show has earned Lakshmi, one of the producers on the show, multiple Primetime Emmy Award nominations and a win for Outstanding Reality-Competition Program in 2010.

Parma Lakshmi has authored a second cookbook (Tangy, Tar, Hot and Sweet – 2007) and a memoir - Love, Loss, and What We Ate (2016.) In addition to her continued role on Top Chef, Lakshmi also occasionally writes for such publications as The New York Times and Harper’s Bazaar.