Leslee was voted by the New York Times the No.2 Most Impactful Woman of 2015 (second to Hillary Clinton), and has been awarded the prestigious Swedish Anna Lindh Human Rights Prize (previously won by Madeleine Albright). She has also been named Safe’s Global Hero of 2015, Global Thinker by Foreign Policy, and the GlobalmindED award for Arts and Education. In 2019 Leslee was awarded the UN Women for Peace Activist Award at the United Nations, UN Association USA’s Global Citizen of 2019 and the Gandhi Foundation International Peace Award.

Previously a preeminent flmmaker, Leslee’s feature film, ‘East is East’, (35 prestigious awards including a BAFTA) did much to promote tolerance and the celebration of. Her documentary ‘India’s Daughter’ won 32 awards (including the Peabody) and is recognised as having sparked a global movement to end violence against women and girls.

After making this film, Leslee founded “Think Equal”, of which she is also the Executive Chair. This early years education programme, the solution to the problem the film laid bare, is currently impacting 182,000+ children in 20 countries across 6 continents. Think Equal has been awarded the prestigious World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) Award 2020 and has been selected as one of the HundrED Global Collection 2020 Most Innovative Innovations in K-12 Education. Partners of Think Equal include UNICEF; UNESCO; Jeffrey Sachs’s Earth Institute and SDSN at Columbia University; the World Bank; Montessori; the Institute for Healthy Minds (Wisconsin Madison University) and the Yale University Center for Emotional Intelligence. Leslee is on various high-level think tanks, including the Inter-American Development Bank’s ‘Coalition for 21st Century Skills’; Pope Francis’s Pontifical Academy: ‘Global Compact for Education’; and the High-Level Advisory Group to deliver UN SDG Mission 4.7 alongside Ban Ki-Moon, Audrey Azoulay (Director-General UNESCO), Jeffrey Sachs, Fernando Reimers (Harvard), and others.