• Birthplace: Chennai, India
• Age: 54
• Height: 175 cm
• Weight: 64 kg
• Website: N/A

Padma Parvati Lakshmi Vaidynathan (born September 1, 1970), known professionally as Padma Lakshmi (pronounced ), is an American author, actress, model, and television host. She is the host of the US cooking competition program Top Chef.

She has hosted the show continuously since season 2 (2006), with season 17 (2020) being the latest. For her work, she received a Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Reality Host in 2009.

She has published three cookbooks and one memoir. She has also ventured into acting in film and television, and hosted several cooking programs before Top Chef. She also launched her own kitchenware line.

Padma Parvati Lakshmi Vaidynathan was born in Madras (now Chennai), India, into a middle-class Tamil family. Her mother, Vijaya, is a retired oncologist. Her father is a retired executive with the pharmaceutical company Pfizer. Her parents divorced when she was two. Both of her parents later remarried, and she has a younger half-brother and half-sister from her father's side. She grew up first in New York and then in Los Angeles with her mother and stepfather. She returned to India for several months each year to visit her grandparents and family.

In 1984, when Lakshmi was 14 years old, she was hospitalized for three weeks, and eventually diagnosed with Stevens–Johnson syndrome, a rare illness caused by hypersensitivity to an infection, or a potentially fatal reaction to certain kinds of medications.

Two days after her discharge from the hospital, she was injured in a car accident in Malibu, California, which left her with a fractured right hip and a shattered right upper arm. The arm injury required surgery, which left her with a seven-inch scar between her elbow and shoulder. As a teenager growing up in Los Angeles, she stated that she was bullied and endured racial aggression, which caused her to struggle to overcome "internalized self-loathing."

Lakshmi graduated from William Workman High School in City of Industry, California, in 1988. She is a 1992 graduate of Clark University, in Worcester, Massachusetts, where she earned a BA with honors in theater arts. During her time in school, she studied abroad in Madrid, where her modeling career began.

Lakshmi speaks English, Italian, Spanish, Tamil and Hindi.

Lakshmi wrote in The New York Times that she was sexually assaulted as a small girl, "When I was 7 years old, my stepfather’s relative touched me between my legs and put my hand on his erect penis. Shortly after I told my mother and stepfather, they sent me to India for a year to live with my grandparents. The lesson was: If you speak up, you will be cast out."

She also revealed a 1986 sexual assault in 2018, in which she was raped at the age of 16. She wrote, "It took me decades to talk about this with intimate partners and a therapist. Now, 32 years after my rape, I am stating publicly what happened. I am speaking now because I want us all to fight so that our daughters never know this fear and shame and our sons know that girls’ bodies do not exist for their pleasure and that abuse has grave consequences."

Lakshmi's modeling career began at age 21. While studying abroad in Madrid, she was discovered by an agent at a café. She has said, "I was the first Indian model to have a career in Paris, Milan, and New York. I'm the first one to admit that I was a novelty." Lakshmi was able to pay off her college loans by working as a model and actress.

Lakshmi has modeled for designers such as Emanuel Ungaro, Giorgio Armani, Gianni Versace, Ralph Lauren, and Alberta Ferretti, and appeared in ad campaigns for Roberto Cavalli and Versus. She was a favorite model of the photographer Helmut Newton, whose photographs of her often highlighted the large scar on her right arm.

Lakshmi has appeared on the covers of Redbook, Vogue India, FHM, Cosmopolitan, L'Officiel India, Asian Woman, Avenue, Industry Magazine, Marie Claire (India Edition), Harper's Bazaar, Town & Country, and Newsweek. She also posed nude for the May 2009 issue of Allure.

For hosting, she is the current host and one of the judges on the television show Top Chef, having joined in 2006 during its season 2. She has since hosted the show consecutively, with season 17 the latest. The show has been nominated in Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Reality-Competition Program from season 2 up until season 16, with season 6 winning the award in 2010.

She also serves as an executive producer of the show. Lakshmi was nominated in the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Host for a Reality or Reality-Competition Program in 2009 for the season 5 of Top Chef.

Previously, Lakshmi first served as a host of Domenica In, Italy's top-rated television show, in 1997. She hosted the Food Network series Padma's Passport, which was part of the larger series Melting Pot in 2001, where she cooked recipes from around the world. She also hosted two one-hour specials in South India and Spain for the British culinary tourism show Planet Food, broadcast on the Food Network in the U.S. and internationally on the Discovery Channels.

Lakshmi was also an official contributor for the season 19 of The View from 2015 to 2016. For celebrity contestant, she competed and won against music producer Randy Jackson in an episode of TBS's Drop the Mic that aired on December 26, 2017.

For acting, Lakshmi's first film roles were in the Italian pirate movies The Son of Sandokan and Caraibi (Pirates: Blood Brothers). She had a comical supporting part as the lip-synching disco singer Sylk in the 2001 American movie Glitter, starring Mariah Carey. In 2002, she made a guest appearance as alien princess Kaitaama in "Precious Cargo," the 37th episode of the science fiction TV series Star Trek: Enterprise. She portrayed Madhuvanthi in the TV series Sharpe's Challenge (2004-05). In 2006, Lakshmi appeared in ABC's Biblical TV series The Ten Commandments as Princess Bithia. In 2009, Lakshmi starred in the video for the Eels song "That Look You Give That Guy".

She starred in the 2003 Bollywood film Boom, alongside Katrina Kaif and Madhu Sapre, as one of three supermodels who are accused of stealing diamonds. She played the role of Geeta in Paul Mayeda Berges's 2005 film The Mistress of Spices. Lakshmi also made a guest appearance on the NBC series 30 Rock in 2009 and appeared on Whose Line Is It Anyway? in 2014.