WOMEN OF ASTORIA
Founding Essay
By Shivani Dhir
In late 2025, I ran for New York State Assembly in the AD36 special election. I shared that race with three other women. Rana Abdelhamid, Mary Jobaida, Diana Moreno. Four women of color, all deeply committed to the same community. Sitting at that candidate forum, looking down the table, I thought: this is not nothing.
But that moment was not what started this project.
I have lived in Astoria for nearly fifteen years. Long enough to know this neighborhood as a living thing, something that has changed around me and changed me in return. During the campaign, I attended community events and talked to so many people across Astoria. And everywhere I went, I kept meeting women.
Not just the candidates. The women running the small businesses that anchor their blocks. The community leaders who show up to every meeting, every crisis, every moment that requires someone to hold things together. The neighbors who have been quietly building belonging for years without anyone making a formal note of it. Women doing the work because the work needed doing.
That experience did not show me something new. It confirmed something I had been living alongside for fifteen years without fully naming.
The often hidden work of women is what powers this community. It always has been.
Too often, that work goes unseen. Not unnoticed. The people around them notice enormously. But undocumented. Uncelebrated in the ways we tend to celebrate things: publicly, on record, in a form that lasts. The women I met during that campaign were building Astoria’s history in real time, and almost none of it was being written down.
Women of Astoria is a storytelling project dedicated to the women who shape everyday life here. Through portraits, interviews, and neighborhood reflections, it documents the people whose contributions often go unseen but are deeply felt. The small business owners, the caregivers, the artists, the organizers, the longtime residents who hold neighborhood memory, the newcomers building something new.
Women’s History Month asks us to look back. Women of Astoria asks us to look around.
The women making this neighborhood’s history are here right now, on 31st Street and Steinway and by the waterfront and in the schools and the community boards. This project is an attempt to see them clearly, to sit with them long enough to understand what they have built, and to put it on record.
One woman, once a month. Starting now.
Do you know a woman whose story belongs here? Nominate her. Send her name, a little about who she is, and why her story matters to this neighborhood. Email: shiv821@gmail.com
Women of Astoria publishes monthly on Medium and Instagram.