Brown Lecture Board announces Fall Lecture speaker

This year's Fall Lecture speaker will be actress/activist/philanthropist Gina Rodriguez!Rodriguez is perhaps best-known for her portrayal of Jane Villanueva on The CW's hit comedy-drama Jane The Virgin. Her work for the show earned her Golden Globe nominations for Best Actress – Television – Musical or Drama in both 2015 and 2016. (She won the award in 2015, by the way!) Beyond Jane The Virgin, Rodriguez has also acted in feature-film Filly Brown, soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful, and—most recently—action movie Deepwater Horizon.Rodriguez stands out as an incredibly successful Latina actress amidst a notoriously homogenous industry. Just look at recent years' Academy Award winners—does #OscarsSoWhite ring a bell?—to get a sense of the systemic racism present in the world of film.Beyond acting, Rodriguez is also a philanthropist and an activist, supporting higher education among the Hispanic community (she's a member of the Hispanic Scholarship Fund's Board of Directors), combating bullying, and encouraging first-generation college students, for example.Rodriguez will speak at Brown on Monday, November 21st at 7:00 p.m. in the Salomon DeCiccio Auditorium. Tickets will be distributed through a three-day lottery on the Brown Lecture Board's website. Check out the Fall Lecture's Facebook event for more information. Image via.