About Puja

Puja Dhawan is the Director for NoVo Foundation’s Initiative to End Violence Against Girls and Women. Puja was previously the Senior Program Officer for the U.S. Human Rights Fund at Public Interest Projects -– a donor collaborative that provides strategic field-building support to social justice organizations engaged in human rights work within the United States. Puja joined the U.S. Human Rights Fund when it first launched in 2005, and over the next four years helped build the Fund’s grantmaking, program, and fundraising work.

Puja has also done consulting work on developing domestic human rights funding and advocacy strategies.  She authored a 2010 report for the Asian Law Caucus on integrating domestic human rights into the Asian American advocacy community, and consulted with the International Human Rights Funders Group.

After law school, Puja worked as a Staff Attorney at Bay Area Legal Aid, where she represented battered women in their family law proceedings, and worked on gender and caste discrimination in South Asia at Human Rights Watch. She earned her J.D. from NYU School of Law and a B.A. (honors) from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.