“Overlooked:” Reclaiming the Stories of Remarkable Women with New York Times Editor Amisha (Amy) Padnani

Hoosier Women at Work (HWW) is proud to welcome Amisha (Amy) Padnani, an award-winning senior staff editor at The New York Times and creator of the Overlooked project, to the Madam Walker Legacy Center.

Overlooked tells the stories of remarkable women and people of color whose deaths were never reported by The New York Times in its 168-year history.  After joining The Times's obituaries desk as an editor, Padnani noticed that the section was dominated by white men and sought ways to balance its coverage. Overlooked launched in 2018 with the stories of 15 women, and has since included people of color and subjects from the LGBTQ and disability communities. A book, published in November 2023, features 66 Overlooked obituaries, about two dozen of which never appeared in The Times. Get your copy of the Overlooked book via Penguin Random House here.

Padnani's speaking engagements have included TED, Creative Mornings, the National Museum for Women in the Arts, the Dead Ladies Show, Dropbox, Button, and other organizations. She has been interviewed on NPR, Democracy Now, CBC, CBS, and the BBC. She was named Incredible Woman of the Year by Porter Magazine in 2018 and has won a number of other awards since. (Bio from Padnani’s website: https://www.amypadnani.com/)

The Madam Walker Legacy Center is the only surviving iconic building on Indiana Avenue, a significant piece of Indiana and U.S. history, and an integral part of the Indianapolis community. Thanks to the Walker Center's donation of their beautiful space for this event, along with generous funding from Indiana Humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Women's Fund of Central Indiana, this Overlooked presentation is free to the public, but you must still have a ticket.

This event also serves as the keynote presentation for the sixth Hoosier Women at Work Conference which will be held throughout the day of Saturday, October 5, 2024 across the street at the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library. Learn more about the conference and how to participate in the full day of events here. For more information on the conference, contact IHB historian Jill Weiss Simins: jweiss@library.IN.gov.