highlight (color) a panda data frame row by index

In case you want to highlight two rows (say index 2 and 4) it is a almost a duplicate of this answer

new_df.style.apply(lambda x: ['background: lightgreen' if x.name in [2,4] 
                              else '' for i in x], 
                   axis=1)

If instead you are looking to highlight every row that contain a given name in a list (i.e. lst = ['car', 'boat']) you can use

new_df.style.apply(lambda x: ['background: lightgreen' if (set(lst).intersection(x.values)) 
                              else '' for i in x], 
                   axis=1)