Biographical Note
Dr. Brenda E. F. Beck is an adjunct professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto Scarborough. She was drawn to Tamil culture after she visited the state of Tamil Nadu in Southern India when she was 14 years old and has spent her life documenting Tamil culture. In 1964, she returned to the region, to the village of Olappalayam, where she conducted her doctoral research. Her interests include South Asian mythology and Tamil folk stories. She has written several books and journal articles about the region, including, Perspectives on a regional culture: essays about the Coimbatore Area of South India edited by Brenda E. F. Beck (1979), The three twins: the telling of a South Indian folk (1982) and The Legend of Ponnivala (2013). In 1992, Beck and a Indo-Canadian animator and artist Ravichandran Arumugam translated and created an illustrated two-volume book of the epic folktale Annamaar Kadhai in Tamil and English. She created a series of graphic novels and a 13-hour, 26-episode animated series for children regarding, The Legend of Ponnivala (2013).
Beck is an advocate for the large community of Tamils living in the diaspora. In 2016, she helped develop an app to teach Tamil to students in Toronto, which has a large population of Tamils. In 2018, she founded the Brenda Beck Tamil Programming Fund and the Brenda Beck Tamil Digital Fund, which aid in investing and distributing funds for digitizing archives. With Beck's assistance, in 2019, the University of Toronto Scarborough held its first Tamil Heritage Month celebration.
Beck has received numerous awards from various Tamil community groups based in the United States, Canada, Tamil Nadu, Sri Lanka, and Malaysia. She serves as president of the Sophia Hilton Foundation of Canada, a charity that "promotes the use of storytelling at all educational levels."