Puja Dhawan

Senior Manager, Initiatives for Girls and Women

Puja Dhawan is the Senior Manager of Initiatives for Girls and Women at the NoVo Foundation.  Her work focuses on ending violence against women and girls, and empowering women and girls in the United States and overseas.  She was previously the Senior Program Officer for the U.S. Human Rights Fund at Public Interest Projects, where she carried out domestic human rights grantmaking and donor outreach.  Puja has also done consulting work on developing domestic human rights funding and advocacy strategies.  She authored the 2010 report Domestic Dignity for the Asian Law Caucus on integrating domestic human rights into the Asian American advocacy community, and was a contributing author for Perfecting Our Union: Human Rights Success Stories from Across the United States. She worked on international human rights law at the U.N. Division for the Advancement of Women, where she assisted the monitoring body for the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, and at Human Rights Watch where she worked on gender and caste discrimination in South Asia .   After law school, Puja worked as a Staff Attorney at Bay Area Legal Aid, and represented battered women in family law proceedings.  She earned her J.D. from NYU School of Law and a B.A.(honors) from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.