2025 BIPOC Elders + Culture Bearers
Tomás J. Benitez
Tomás J. Benitez has been an arts advocate and cultural worker for 50 years. He served as a consultant to the Smithsonian Institute, the President’s Council for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the University of Notre Dame, USC, UCLA, the Mexican Fine Art Center Museum in Chicago, and the California Arts Council. He has lectured on Chicano art and culture in Berlin, Mexico City, London, Israel, Glasgow, South Africa, and throughout the US. Tomás is the former Executive Director of Self Help Graphics & Art and remains a consultant for several nonprofit arts organizations.
His career in theatre includes working with Carmen Zapata of Bilingual Foundation for the Arts, as well as with Jack Jackson at the Inner City Cultural Center. He was a member of El Teatro de la Esperanza and founded his own company, Teatro Café, in the 1980s. Tomás founded the Theater for Social Justice Initiative at Plaza de la Raza. Tomás earned his BA in Theatre Arts and Chicano Studies from CSU Long Beach in 1976.
Tomás is an emeritus board member of the Californians for the Arts and the California Arts Advocates. He is a former Chairman and board member of the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and is the past Chairman of the Board of Latino Arts Network of California.
His play, “Los Minnicanos,” commissioned by the Mixed Blood Theatre Company of Minnesota, toured the Midwest for years. He wrote the screenplay for “Salsa!” produced by Canon Films 1987.
Toni McClendon
Lois “Toni” McClendon, a community elder and cultural activist, is the creator of Rainbow Village Connections, which brings people together through culture and creativity. Toni is a storyteller in the African American Oral Tradition and a Certified InterPlay Leader / Life Practice teacher. InterPlay is a system and practice that uses music, movement, voice, story, and gentle guided activities to tap into the wisdom of the body.
She has many years of employment in social services, community education, and nonprofit community-based programming. Among her service work, Lois has been a radio producer and co-host for community programming, as well as a lead writer and editor for a comprehensive, anti-violence strategic document. She has facilitated workshops performed at community festivals, church retreats, summer camps, literary celebrations, schools, senior citizens’ residences, and other venues throughout the Pittsburgh, PA, region, as well as nationally. She was one of the founders of New Voices for Reproductive Justice.
She is a New Pittsburgh Courier Woman of Excellence (2023).
Most recently, Toni has been using her storytelling and InterPlay gifts at several Artist and Teaching Artist Residency programs with young people of African descent.
Internationally, Toni was a delegate through Women for Racial and Economic Equality (WREE) at the 1987 World Congress of Women—UN/NGO in the Soviet Union (Russia and Uzbekistan). In 1988 she represented WREE at the Nuclear Free Zone Conference in Berlin.
A long-time peace and social justice activist, Toni has been involved with practically every movement from Civil Rights to Black Liberation; Anti-war and Anti-Apartheid to women’s equality and children’s rights; and the environmental justice and reproductive justice movements to today’s “Black Lives Matter” movement. Getting her activist “genes” from both her paternal and maternal heart-line, Toni firmly believes in rights and dignity for all creation.
Graciela I. Sánchez
Graciela I. Sánchez follows in the footsteps of her mother and abuelitas, strong neighborhood women of color cultural workers and activists of San Antonio. As a Buena Gente of the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, a community-based cultural arts/social justice organization, Graciela works with staff and community to develop programs that culturally ground working class and poor people of color, queer people and women, individuals who are survivors of cultural genocide. Facilitating conversations on issues of colonization, genocide, power, violence, racism, sexism, and homophobia among others, Graciela works with community members to develop and curate programs such as CineMujer, Uprooted: Tierra, Gente, y Cultura, Palestinians and Other Occupied Peoples, as well as organize gente to challenge oppressive laws in San Antonio, the United States and the world.
John Tetpon
John (Nasoalook) Tetpon is an Iñupiaq master carver and journalist and writer originally from Shaktoolik, Alaska, a village located on the Norton Sound about 125 miles east of Nome.
Tetpon worked as a journalist for the Anchorage Daily News and The Anchorage Times, and covered state and federal courts, police and crime, and rural issues. He also served as the director of communications for the Alaska Federation of Natives, the largest statewide Native organization in Alaska. He won a Pulitzer Prize as a reporter for the series “A People in Peril” published in 1988 by the Anchorage Daily News.
In traditional Iñupiaq arts, he is a master walrus ivory, whale bone, and wood carver. He learned how to carve from his father, and he taught his son how to carve. He shared what it means to be a traditional artist and carver: “Our ancestry is the source of all Native art, the stories, the legends, the myths, and the heritage. And artists who carry the mental capacity and spiritual strength to transform stone, ivory, wood, silver, baleen, whalebone, and increasingly, other mediums from the Earth, to complete interpretations of Native culture in art all share the gifts freely given to them from thousands of years of our existence.”
In a recently published article, “For a survivor of cultural genocide in Alaska, there’s a need to reconnect to language, culture”, Tetpon stated, “What would it take to make me whole? Give me back my language. Give me back my songs, dances, stories and familial connections. Give me back my history.”