THE NATIONAL Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) will now be headed by historian Rene R. Escalante, the current chairman of National Historical Commission of the Philippines (NHCP).
He was elected chairman during a Board of Commissioners meeting at the Metropolitan Theater on July 7 which was called after the resignation of Cultural Center of the Philippines president and concurrent NCCA chairman Arsenio “Nick” Lizaso.
Mr. Escalante will be serving as Chairman of NCCA for the remaining six months of 2022.
Mr. Escalante is a professor of history and a former chair of the Department of History of De La Salle University Manila. He holds a doctorate degree in History from the University of the Philippines in Diliman.
Mr. Escalante is also a published academic. Among his books are The American Friar Lands Policy: Its Framers, Context and Beneficiaries (2002); The Bearer of Pax Americana: The Philippine Career of William H. Taft (2007); and History of Hacienda de Imus (2013).
In his time in government, Mr. Escalante served as secretary of the NCCA National Committee on Historical Research (NCHR) from 2004 to 2007 and was head of the NCHR from 2008 to 2010. He was appointed as a member of the Commission on Higher Education Technical Panel on history from 2015 to 2016. In 2010, he was appointed Commissioner of the NHCP before he was elected agency chairman in 2017. — Michelle Anne P. Soliman
