I am Winston Benons Jr.—The Culturalist—an interdisciplinary artist-scholar, cultural strategist, and founder of tRúe Culture & Arts. My work braids Afro-Diasporic dance, visual storytelling, and humanities research to activate the body as a living archive of memory, identity, and social change. Across classrooms, community stages, and digital spaces, I design experiences that honor ancestral wisdom. While simultaneously daring new cultural possibilities like curating screen-dance installations, producing MainStage concerts, or creating and guiding immersive excursions. With over a decade of teaching and leadership in independent schools, corporate training roots, and a research practice shaped by the University of Chicago and Harvard, I translate scholarship into vibrant accessible programs that empower communities and cultivate generational equity. Guided by the tRúe credo “Rooted in wisdom, rising toward innovation.” I invite audiences to move, make, and imagine a world where art, knowledge, and collective futures grow in concert.​

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Is an active member of the Association of the Studies of the Worldwide African Diaspora(ASWAD), and is a member of the ASWAD Outreach and Engagement Committee.  He attended the academic conference Diasporic Encounters and Collaborations in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. While in Brazil he was able to build relationships and explore life in Salvador da Bahia. He also attended the conference on Afro Latino Identity at the CUNY Graduate Center and Beyond Visibility: Rethinking the African Diaspora in Latin America at the University of California, Berkeley where he became a member of the Afro-Latino Working group. He presented research and was the panel chair of the Music, Arts and Memory through Integration in Educational Practice panel that was part of the Caribbean Studies Association (CSA)annual conference in partnership with Universidad de la Habana in Havana, Cuba in 2018. He was also chosen to present his research at the 2019 CSA Conference in Santa Marta,Colombia The Caribbean in times of Tempest: Ethnicities, Territorial Resistances and Epistemic Poetics.  He presented his workshop Sonata, Sonnet & Social Justice as part of the Teaching Social Activism Conference at the Museum of the City of New York.

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