Amanda Nguyen

Amanda Nguyen is a civil rights activist. She ignited the Stop Asian Hate movement and passed the Sexual Assault Survivors' Rights Act, both in the United States and with the United Nations. As the founder and CEO of Rise, a social movement accelerator, she teaches grassroots organizing. She is also an expert advisor on the Chloé Sustainability Board. A significant part of her advocacy work focuses on being a sexual abuse victim advocate.

For her tireless efforts, she has been recognized as a Nobel Peace Prize Nominee and in 2022, she was named TIME Woman of the Year. Nguyen played Hanoi Hannah in Spike Lee’s film "Da Five Bloods". She has also served at the White House, Department of State, and NASA. Currently, she is an astronaut candidate at the International Institute of Astronautical Sciences and is slated to be part of the crew for Blue Origin's eleventh flight to space under the New Shepard program, scheduled for spring 2025. This will make her the first Vietnamese woman to fly to space.

In recognition of her work, Nguyen is a Heinz Laureate and Nelson Mandela Changemaker and was included in the Forbes 30 Under 30 lists in 2017 and 2019. She was also named as one of Foreign Policy's Top 100 Global Thinkers in 2016 and was included in the Time 100 Next list in 2019. Her other accolades include being featured in The Frederick Douglass 200 List in 2018 and The Tempest's 40 Women to Watch in 2017. In 2016, she received the Young Women's Honors Award from Marie Claire, and later, in 2019, she was recognized in Vanity Fair's Global Goals. She was featured in the BBC's 100 Women of 2021 list. In 2018, Shepard Fairey created a portrait of Amanda Nguyen for the "We the Future" campaign, which was distributed to 20,000 schools in the U.S. She is also featured in the 2022 anthology "We Are Here: 30 Inspiring Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders Who Have Shaped the United States." Nguyen served at NASA and the State Department under the Obama Administration and is an alumnus of Harvard University.