An evening with Common

Award-winning actor, artist and activist Common will be the next guest of the UTRGV Distinguished Speaker Series at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday in the university Performing Arts Complex in Edinburg.

The Distinguished Speaker Series is hosted by the Student Activities office and is in its 18th season, according to Cindy Mata-Vasquez, UTRGV’s director of Student Activities.

“One of the good things about this event is that he will be in person,” Mata-Vasquez said. “So, he is the first in-person speaker we’ve had since March 2020 at the Edinburg campus, but we will also be able to offer a livestream.”

While the event is open to the community, the university offers priority seating to UTRGV students, faculty and staff.

“As long as you have your student ID or staff ID, we’ll definitely let you in for the UTRGV line,” Mata-Vasquez said. “We are expecting doors to open at 7 p.m. … Hopefully, we fill up with that line, but if [we] still have space, we’ll open up the community line at 7:15 p.m.”

Student Activities is excited to “kick off” the semester with the world-renowned recording artist, according to Mata-Vasquez.

“We thought it’d be great after the Week of Welcome celebrations,” she said. “And we could have this amazing speaker not only kick off African American History Month, but also kind of kick off this semester for us on a good note.”

Common first became known for his conscious rap and later transitioned into acting.

“One of the things … with this series is that it’s once-in-a-lifetime [opportunity],” Mata-Vasquez said. “So, I always tell our students, ‘you never know when you’re going to be in a room again with someone, you know, like Common.’”

The university hopes to create a sense of normalcy by holding the event in person.

“The committee had wanted us to really bring that sense of normalcy back,” Mata-Vasquez said. “We know that the first two weeks of spring semester haven’t been what we all expected.

“But, you know, we had a little setback with everyone being virtual these first two weeks. So, being that we’re going to be back, this is our second day, really, back on campus with everybody. We do hope that students not only feel that sense of normalcy, but see that things are returning to what they were.”

Next year, the university plans to offer more hybrid events that can be viewed in person or online.

Actress Lana Condor, best known from the movie trilogy on Netflix, “To All the Boys I Loved Before,”

will be the third and final speaker in a virtual setting in March, she said.