6. Alfonso Ossorio
Alfonso Ossorio is a respected painter who painted the mural The Angry Christ at the St. Joseph Church in Victorias City, Negros Occidental. Dubbed as “The Man Who Had Too Much,” the Manila-born artist had a large mansion in the Hamptons and threw lavish parties for his friends, including famed painter Jackson Pollock. In fact, Pollock’s works were influenced by Ossorio.
7. Bea Valdes
Bea Valdes is known for her bold and statement-making jewelry, as well as bags which Vogue called “the must have evening bags of [2005].” Valdes’s creations have been worn by Sharon Stone, Kate Hudson, Kate Moss, the Queen of Malaysia, Zaha Hadid, Rachel Roy, and models of the Victoria’s Secret fashion show in 2014. Despite her international following, she chooses to work in Manila and work with local artisans.
8. Reinabelle Reyes
At 26, astrophysicist Reinabelle Reyes proved Albert Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity right. In 2010, Reyes and her team proved that galaxies up to 3.5 billion light years away are clustered together, and they came up with a new astronomical measurement that measures how galaxies are pulled together by gravity. Reyes is currently a fellow at the University of Chicago’s Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, but she got her start by graduating summa cum laude at the Ateneo de Manila University for a degree in BS Physics.
9. Miguel Syjuco
Writer Miguel Syjuco is known for Ilustrado, a book that has won a string of important awards. In 2008 alone, it won the Grand Prize at the Novel in English category at the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature and the Man Asian Literary Prize, sponsored by the same group that sponsors the renowned Man Booker Prize. In 2010, Ilustrado won the QWF Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction, Quebec’s top literary prize. The same year, the New York Times named it as one of the Notable Books of 2010.
10. Teofilo Yldefonso
Teofilo Yldefonso holds the record for being the first Filipino and Southeast Asian to have won an Olympic medal. He is also a three-time multi-awarded Olympian, representing the Philippines in the Amsterdam Olympics in 1928, the Los Angeles Olympics in 1932, and the Berlin Olympics in 1936. In 1928, he won the bronze medal in the 200-meter breast-stroke. Yldefonso served the country in World War II and was detained at a Japanese concentration camp. A Japanese lieutenant, who was a fan, was said to have offered to release him, but he refused to leave his men. Yldefonso is hailed as the country’s greatest swimmer and the Father of the Modern Breast-stroke, after coming up with a more efficient way of swimming. In 2009, he was inducted to the Hall of Fame by the International Swimming Federation.
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