Gator Delroy Lindo to deliver keynote address at 2026 Commencement
The Academy Award-nominated actor is one of four accomplished individuals to receive an honorary degree from SFSU this year
Award-winning actor and alumnus Delroy Lindo (B.A., ’04) will deliver this year’s keynote address at San Francisco State University’s 125th Commencement ceremony on Thursday, May 21. Lindo was chosen to receive an honorary doctorate degree, along with four others. The other recipients are artist, activist and educator Juana Alicia; pioneering Bay Area broadcast journalist Wendy Tokuda; and journalist, activist and theatrical producer Jose Antonio Vargas (B.A., ’04).
The University will celebrate their many accomplishments and those of the thousands of graduating students. The University anticipates a crowd of nearly 30,000 family members and friends celebrating their graduates. Doors at Oracle Park will open at 1 p.m. The graduate procession begins at 3 p.m. The ceremony is estimated to conclude around 7 p.m.
Can’t make it in person? The entire ceremony will be streamed live. A link to the livestream will be available on the Commencement website closer to the date of Commencement. During the ceremony, live updates and photos will be posted to the University’s Instagram and Facebook accounts. Graduates and guests can tag their Commencement posts on social media using the hashtag #SFSU2026.
Commencement information is available via the SF State mobile app. Once you’ve downloaded the SF State mobile app, visit “SF State’s 2026 Commencement Ceremony, See More Ceremony Info.” Be sure to opt into the University’s Commencement reminders by selecting “Manage Commencement Alerts” to receive push notifications. Details are also available on the Commencement website.
Commencement Speaker and Honorary Doctorate
Delroy Lindo (B.A., ’04)
Actor
Delroy Lindo is an English-American actor who discovered his passion for acting at a young age while playing one of the three kings in a school nativity play. Since then, he’s starred in dozens of films, plays and television shows, receiving award recognition, including an Academy Award nomination and Actor Award (formerly SAG-AFTRA) win this year for “Sinners,” three NAACP Image Awards, nominations for a Drama Desk Award, a Helen Hayes Award, a Tony Award, two Critics’ Choice Television Awards and three Screen Actors Guild Awards.
After graduating from San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater, he made his big-screen debut in the 1979 film “More American Graffiti.” In 1988, he received a Tony Award nomination on Broadway for his portrayal of Herald Loomis in the August Wilson play “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.”
It was Lindo’s performance as Loomis that caught the attention of film director Spike Lee, who cast him in “Malcolm X” (1992). This marked the beginning of their more than 30-year film relationship, with roles in “Crooklyn” (1994), “Clockers” (1995) and “Da 5 Bloods” (2020), for which Lindo won a New York Film Critics Circle Award for his portrayal of a Vietnam veteran. His other film credits include “Get Shorty” (1995), “Ransom” (1996), “The Cider House Rules” (1999) and “Gone in 60 Seconds” (2000). Most recently he received an Oscar nomination in the Best Supporting Actor category for his role as Delta Slim in Ryan Coogler’s genre-bending horror film “Sinners.” He also won widespread acclaim and awards for his work on four seasons of the CBS series “The Good Fight” and his role in Hulu’s comedy series “UnPrisoned” (2023).
In his 50s he became the first in his family to attend college, graduating from SFSU with a B.A. in Cinema in 2004. He went on to earn an MFA from New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. He was awarded an honorary doctorate in Arts and Humanities from Virginia Union University.
He served on the College of Ethnic Studies Committee and hosted the program’s 41st anniversary celebration in 2010. In 2021, he was inducted into SFSU’s Alumni Hall of Fame and delivered the virtual keynote address at the School of Cinema’s Valediction Ceremony. Over the years he’s shared advice with students in SFSU’s School of Cinema and its Project Rebound program. He currently serves as a director on SFSU’s Foundation board.
Honorary Doctorate Recipients
Juana Alicia
Artist and educator
Juana Alicia has created murals and worked as a printmaker, sculptor, illustrator and studio painter for over 30 years. Her style, akin to genres of contemporary Latin American literary movements, can be characterized as magical and social realism. Her work addresses issues of justice, gender equality, environmental crisis and the power of resistance.
She’s been recognized for her art, receiving awards and fellowships including a Fulbright Fellowship, a Windcall Residency, a Master Muralist Award (Precita Eyes) and a California Arts Council Legacy Artist Award, among many others.
Her sculptural and painted public commissions can be seen in Nicaragua, Mexico, Pennsylvania and in many parts of California, most notably in San Francisco. They include “Sanarte” at UCSF Medical Center, “Santuario” at the San Francisco International Airport (with Emmanuel C. Montoya), “La Llorona’s Sacred Waters” at 24th and York streets in San Francisco, the collectively created “MAESTRAPEACE” mural of the San Francisco Women’s Building and the “Gemelos” mural at the Metropolitan Technical University in Mérida, Mexico.
The Detroit native taught for over 40 years at schools and universities in California and Mexico, including SFSU, Stanford University, the University of California at Santa Cruz and Davis, La Escuela Superior de Artes de Yucatán and Berkeley City College.
During her decade teaching at Berkeley City College, she founded and directed the True Colors Public Murals program, through which her students created 10 murals in the Bay Area. She has contributed two murals to SFSU’s Student Center building: “Mission Street Manifesto” and “From Incarceration to Liberation.”
Recently, Juana Alicia completed illustrations for the graphic novel “La X’Tabay” authored by her husband Tirso González Araiza. Her new fused-glass window for the Mission Branch of the San Francisco Public Library will be inaugurated in summer 2026, when the library reopens after a major restoration.
She holds a B.A. from the University of California, Santa Cruz and an MFA from San Francisco Art Institute. Alicia has lived for over five decades in California and Mexico. She currently divides her time between the San Francisco Bay Area and Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico.
Wendy Tokuda
Broadcast journalist
Wendy Tokuda was the first Asian American to anchor primetime weekday newscasts in the Bay Area. She became a household name during the ’80s and ’90s, co-anchoring the most highly rated newscast in the market. Her career in television spanned nearly 40 years and took her from Seattle to San Francisco and Los Angeles before retiring in 2016.
For 20 years, she reported on her signature series, “Students Rising Above” (SRA), profiling low-income Bay Area teenagers overcoming challenges such as foster care and homelessness. Viewers were asked to donate to help send them to college. SRA grew into a multimillion-dollar nonprofit that, 28 years later, continues to help hundreds of students complete college.
The series won national awards including a Peabody, a National Emmy for Public Service, the national Sigma Delta Chi Public Service Award, the National Association of Broadcasters Education Foundation’s “Service to America” Award and the Temple Award for Creative Altruism.
Decades after World War II, Tokuda became one of the first television journalists to report on the incarceration of 120,000 people of Japanese descent — a part of the war’s history that many Americans still didn’t know. Her parents met in the Minidoka Internment Center.
For her reporting over the years, she has won seven regional Emmy Awards as well as a Golden Mike and numerous other Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA), Associated Press and United Press International awards.
Tokuda’s lifetime awards include the Governors’ Award from the Northern California Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, the Stan Chambers Award for Extraordinary Achievement from the Associated Press Television and Radio Association of California and the RTNDA Lifetime Achievement Award.
She is currently writing a book about her mother’s experience in concentration camps during World War II, drawing on correspondence and journals her mother preserved. The book explores the intergenerational trauma caused by the incarceration. She has also written three children’s books, including “Humphrey, the Lost Whale: A True Story.”
She holds a B.A. from the University of Washington.
Jose Antonio Vargas (B.A., ’04)
Journalist, filmmaker and theatrical producer
Jose Antonio Vargas is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Emmy-nominated filmmaker and Tony-nominated theatrical producer.
A leading voice for immigrant rights, he founded the nonprofit organization Define American, which empowers and champions diverse and nuanced storytelling about immigrant experiences across mediums and industries.
His bestselling memoir, “Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen,” was published in 2018. An updated edition with new material for living in Donald Trump’s America was released in June 2025.
In 2019, he co-produced Heidi Schreck’s acclaimed Broadway play “What the Constitution Means to Me,” which was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Play. His second Broadway production, a staging of David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s musical “Here Lies Love,” played at the Broadway Theatre in 2023.
In 2011, the New York Times Magazine published a groundbreaking essay he wrote in which he revealed and chronicled his life in America as an undocumented immigrant. A year later, he appeared on the cover of TIME magazine with fellow undocumented immigrants as part of a follow-up cover story he wrote. He then produced and directed “Documented,” a documentary feature film on his undocumented experience. Released theatrically, broadcast on CNN and streamed on Netflix, it received a 2015 NAACP Image Award nomination for Outstanding Documentary. Also in 2015, MTV aired “White People,” an Emmy-nominated television special he produced and directed on what it means to be young and white in a demographically changing America.
Accolades he has received include the Freedom to Write Award from PEN Center USA and honorary degrees from Emerson College, Colby College and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
Passionate about promoting equity in education for all students, he serves on the advisory board of TheDream.US, a scholarship fund for undocumented immigrant students, and was a member of the Board of Trustees of the California State University. He is also a proud graduate of SFSU and Mountain View High School, where he was named Alumnus of the Year in 2012. An elementary school named after him opened in his hometown of Mountain View in August 2019.
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