MA Top 30 Professional: Roque Diaz

Senior Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
MacPhail Center for Music

Growing up, trumpet always came more easily to Roque Diaz than schoolwork. Severely dyslexic and the first in his family to go to college, Diaz found refuge in performance, from marching band to orchestral repertoire to Latin bands and jazz.

But everywhere Diaz played, one thing stood out. “I noticed at the end of my performance career there was a lack of representation on stage and in the audience from people of color and those from minority backgrounds.”

A master’s program at the University of Manitoba, in Canada, got Diaz thinking more critically about access in the music field. That led to a Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota, which brought him to Minneapolis and, by extension, the MacPhail Center. Diaz joined the organization in 2018 as its director of school partnerships, for which the Center sends instructors to support area public music programs. He approached his role through a DEI lens from the start. He recruited instructors of color to teach at predominantly Black and brown schools and put a premium on student mental health as operations shifted remotely during the pandemic.

The murder of George Floyd, and the region’s collective racial trauma as a result, only made Diaz’s work more urgent. By the end of 2020, he was leading DEI initiatives for the organization on a parttime basis; by 2021, he became MacPhail’s first senior DEI director. He remains a department of one, but his efforts have already been
widely recognized, most recently with an OnCon Icon Award and as one of COLOR Magazine’s Top Diversity Officers of 2024.