Padnani wrote for metropolitan newspapers like
Newsday,
The Star-Ledger and
The Staten Island Advance before moving to
The New York Times in 2011. She became digital editor of
obituaries at
The New York Times in 2017. In 2020, Padnani and reporter Julia Carmel produced a special section for the
Times: "The A.D.A. at 30: Beyond the Law's Promise." Unusually, an audio version of every story in the series was created, and the special section was
Braille. The project also resulted in a newsroom style guide for
alt-text descriptions of images that illustrate stories online.
Overlooked In 2018, together with the newspaper's gender editor,
Jessica Bennett, Padnani initiated an obituary feature series,
Overlooked, to publish obituaries on notable figures previously overlooked by the
Times, such as
Ida B. Wells and
Sylvia Plath. The series opened with a straightforward statement of intent: The newspaper also invited readers to nominate overlooked individuals meriting commemoration. Padnani has described her personal motivation for the series: "As a woman of color, I am pained when the powerful stories of incredible women and minorities are not brought to light". In a Q&A with the
Society of Professional Journalists Washington, D.C. chapter in 2020, Padnani said that after the series began, many readers thanked her "for giving these people a voice," while others said the series "wouldn't make up for" more than a century "of [the
Times] doing it the wrong way." The
Overlooked series is in the process of being adapted into a
Netflix show and several books. In 2023, Ten Speed Press published
Overlooked: A Celebration of Remarkable, Underappreciated People Who Broke The Rules and Changed the World, authored by Padnani with the
New York Times Obituaries Desk. == Awards and honors ==