2024 Honorary Degree Recipients

Portland State University awards honorary degrees to acknowledge individuals who have achieved outstanding scholarship or artistic accomplishments or performed distinguished public service during their lifetime. Please join us in celebrating our 2024 Honorary Degree recipients!

Alando Simpson

Alando Simpson is the CEO of COR which is a materials management organization that specializes in waste collection, material processing and demolition services. Alando has worked diligently to solidify the company as a leader in the sustainable waste/recycling field with a strong emphasis on the circular economy. His leadership within COR has not only enabled the company to be recognized as a reliable and timely service provider but also a trailblazer in recycling and innovation for the Portland Metro Region.

As the leader of a certified Benefit Corporation, Alando has taken his socially and environmentally conscious principals from his business and has begun to share these values throughout his civic activities. Alando has high aspirations for the Portland Metro Region in hopes to build a 21st century sustainable eco system that fosters a vibrant economy, environmental stewardship and equity for all people. He is also the Chair of the Portland Metro Chamber.

Outside of COR, Alando enjoys free time with his family or you can find him in a CrossFit gym or coaching youth basketball.

Esperanza Spalding

Born in 1984 in Portland, Oregon, esperanza spalding (a.k.a. irma nejando) is an eaabibacliitoti* artist, trained and initiated in the North American (masculine) jazz lineage and tradition. Her work interweaves through various combinations of instrumental music, improvisation, singing, composition, poetry, dance, therapeutic research, storytelling, teaching, regenerative agriculture, urban land & artist-sanctuary custodianship, and growing in love as a daughter, sister, cousin, niece, auntie, great-auntie, friend, while collaboratively decolonizing within and through her hometown community.

She co-founded and serves as lead curator for Prismid Inc., a non-profit that creates and stewards artist residency, performance, and workshop space in Portland, Oregon.

With her dance company Off Brand gOdds (co-founded with Antonio Brown) and the Songwrights Apothecary Lab she leads multi-week performance, teaching, workshop, and therapeutic-arts research residencies in collaboration with colleges and arts venues across the Americas, and throughout the world.

*European-African ancestored being influenced by American cultures living in Indigenous Territories of Turtle Island

Sky Hopinka

Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and spent a number of years in Palm Springs and Riverside, California, Portland, Oregon, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In Portland he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His video, photo, and text work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape, designs of language as containers of culture expressed through personal, documentary, and non fiction forms of media.

His work has played at various festivals including Sundance, Toronto International Film Festival, Ann Arbor, Courtisane Festival, Punto de Vista, and the New York Film Festival. His work was a part of the 2017 Whitney Biennial, the 2018 FRONT Triennial and Prospect.5 in 2021. He was a guest curator at the 2019 Whitney Biennial and participated in Cosmopolis #2 at the Centre Pompidou. He has had a solo exhibition at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, in 2020 and in 2022 at LUMA in Arles, France. He is the recipient of the Infinity Award in Art from the International Center and the Alpert Award for Film/Video and fellowships including The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Sundance Art of Nonfiction, Art Matters, The Guggenheim Foundation, and The Forge Project. In the fall of 2022, Hopinka received a MacArthur Fellowship for his work as a visual artist and filmmaker.

'24 Commencement