On 15 October 2026 in Los Angeles, Priyanka Chopra Jonas received the Woman of Impact award at the InStyle Imagemaker Awards. The magazine honoured her work on and off camera, and the way she has challenged stereotypes and helped open up new roles for women in Hollywood.
Now in its third year, the evening usually celebrates the stylists, make-up artists, hairstylists and other image-makers behind Hollywood’s most talked-about looks. The Woman of Impact award goes to a single personality. Three actresses presented it to her: Megan Suri, Avantika Vandanapu and Amita Rao. Her husband, Nick Jonas, on tour with his brothers, sent a video tribute.
“I don’t think she’d believe it”
Speaking to People, she said what would most surprise her younger self, a shy and introverted girl, would be her tenacity and her will to survive. Asked whether that girl would believe where she has got to, she answered: “I don’t think she’d believe it.” On stage, she summed up her view of public life: “When I think about impact, impact requires courage, tremendous courage.”
From Miss World to Bollywood
Born in Jamshedpur, India, on 18 July 1982, Priyanka Chopra was crowned Miss World in 2000, the fifth Indian woman to win the title. She made her film debut in 2003 with The Hero: Love Story of a Spy and broke through a year later with Aitraaz.
She became one of Bollywood’s most sought-after actresses. Fashion (2008) won her the National Film Award for Best Actress, Indian cinema’s highest honour. Then came Barfi! (2012), Mary Kom (2014), in which she played the Indian boxing champion, and Bajirao Mastani (2015). In 2016 India awarded her the Padma Shri, one of its highest civilian honours.
A first for American network television
In 2015, ABC’s Quantico made her the first South Asian actress to headline an American network drama series. Hollywood followed, with Baywatch (2017), Isn’t It Romantic (2019) and The Matrix Resurrections (2021). More recently she has led the spy series Citadel on Prime Video, the action comedy Heads of State (2025) with John Cena and Idris Elba, and The Bluff (2026) with Karl Urban.
She works behind the camera too. Her company, Purple Pebble Pictures, founded in 2015, has produced films such as The Sky Is Pink (2019), in which she also starred, and she was an executive producer of The White Tiger (2021).
A long-standing commitment
A UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador since 2010, first for India and globally from 2016, she has campaigned in particular for children’s rights and girls’ education. Her memoir, Unfinished, published in 2021, became a New York Times bestseller.
Her next major project takes her back to India: S. S. Rajamouli’s Varanasi, opposite Mahesh Babu, scheduled for 2027. Twenty-six years after her Miss World crown, she still moves easily between continents, and it is exactly that reach the Woman of Impact award set out to recognise.
© Photo: Fuzheado - CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped)
