Maulik Pancholy – Actor, Author, Activist

Maulik Pancholy is an award-winning actor whose television work includes 30 Rock, Whitney, Web Therapy, Elementary, Friends from College, The Good Wife, The Comeback, The Sopranos, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, and more. He is also the voice of Baljeet on the Emmy Award–winning animated series Phineas and Ferband of Sanjay on Sanjay and Craig. Pancholy is the recipient of an Asian American Arts Alliance Award and the Human Rights Campaign’s Visibility Award. 

In 2014, he was named to President Obama’s Advisory Commission on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, which he resigned from in 2017 with nine of his fellow commissioners due to the anti-immigrant and un-American administrative actions and rhetoric by President Trump. 

Since then, he has been named as an advisor to AAPI Victory Fund’s National Leadership Council which advises the organization as the nation heads toward the 2020 elections.

He has also relaunched and chairs Act to Change, a national public awareness campaign on bullying prevention among youth which he helped found during his time on the White House Commission on AAPIs.

He published his debut novel TheBest at It, a hilarious and heartfelt middle grade debut about a gay Indian American boy coming into his own.