Professor Patrick Alcedo was presented the "Pinoy of the Year" award at the Golden Balangay Award Ceremony on 9 September 2017 in Toronto. Alcedo is a Professor of Dance and a Faculty Associate of the York Centre for Asian Research. He was nominated for the award as part of a nationwide call for outstanding Filipinos in Canada.

The Golden Balangay Awards were created to acknowledge and celebrate the contributions of Filipino Canadians and mark their historical achievements as an immigrant community.

“If you meet Professor Alcedo in person you can see why he deserves the award. He brings a contagious optimism and an ambitious energy to everything he does,” said YCAR Director, Abidin Kusno.

Alcedo was born and raised in Aklan, Philippines. He left the Philippines in 1996 when he moved to the United States for his doctoral studies and subsequent fellowships. He arrived in Canada in 2007 when he accepted a job as an Assistant Professor at York.

“As a Filipino immigrant, I faced many challenges when I first moved here,” said Alcedo. “Even though immigrating to Canada by myself did not scare me, I suffered from pangs of loneliness in the beginning. Unlike most Filipino immigrants, I did not have any family members in Toronto.”

Despite the challenges he faced, Professor Alcedo has accomplished a lot in his young career. He is a recognized expert in dance ethnography and Philippine traditional dances. He has also produced and directed several films focusing on social and cultural topics related to the Philippines. His academic work focuses on the performance of gender, folklorization of religion, and world dance in the diaspora.

Alcedo received his PhD in Dance History and Theory from the University of California, Riverside, where he then became a postdoctoral fellow with the Southeast Asian, Text, Ritual, and Performance Program. In 2007, he took residence at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. as a Rockefeller Humanities Fellow in Theorizing Cultural Heritage.

The Golden Balangay Awards aim to promote excellence, hard work, higher education, entrepreneurship, public service, positive relationships and community involvement in the Filipino community in Canada.

When asked about the significance of the Awards, Alcedo said, “while we, Filipinos, are proud of our immense contributions to Canada’s caregiving industry, I hope that we also will become major movers and shakers in other fields, such as business, media, law, governance, research, education and the arts. These awards are a wonderful step towards celebrating our journeys as migrants.”

For more information about the Awards visit http://goldenbalangayawards.com/

Patrick Alcedo at the Golden Balangay Awards ceremony in Toronto

Featured image: Senator Tobias Enverga presenting Pinoy of the Year Award to Patrick Alcedo at the Golden Balangay Awards in Toronto

Photographs by Christian Ryan Panganiban