In honor of ACA’s 35th Anniversary, we are sharing 35 stories from field leaders. We asked Mario Durham, who served on the ACA board from 2012-2021, and as ACA Board Chair during that time, to share a short memory, artifact, or reflection that captures what ACA has meant to him—or how he imagines the future of artist support. In October 2011, Mario Garcia Durham became the fifth President and CEO of the Association of Performing Arts Professionals (APAP) since its founding in 1957. After nine years of successful leadership, he completed a planned departure and leadership transition in June of 2020. He is currently an independent consultant.
“I’ve been thinking a lot over the past few days about my relationship with Artist Communities Alliance, and how singular that work has been in my career. I started working at the National Endowment for the Arts in 2005, and it was there that I really got to know the field of artist residencies—what we called artist colonies in those days. I had spent time in San Francisco before that, so I was somewhat familiar with places like the Djerassi Foundation and Headlands, and a few other artist communities in the Bay Area. But I didn’t know the field particularly well. When I arrived at the NEA, a program that provided funding to artist communities through panel review landed on my desk as part of my portfolio. My background is in the performing arts, so I was only somewhat familiar with artist communities at the time. But I had the great pleasure—and a bit of a learning curve—in beginning to understand just how extraordinary these places were. As an arts administrator, I hadn’t really grasped the depth of their impact before. Over the course of my time at the NEA—I was there for just under ten years—I came to know the community more deeply and realized what a remarkable world it was. At the same time, I began to feel that the way the NEA recognized artist communities didn’t quite go far enough. The NEA wasn’t able to give funding directly to individual artists, but by supporting artist communities we were, in effect, helping artists find the time and space to create and focus on their work. To me, that was the greatest treasure of what artist communities do. So I began working with other staff at the NEA to create a special federal funding category for artist communities. We worked on that effort for well over a year, and eventually the field was recognized independently—separate from performing arts and other disciplines—as its own standalone category. It was the first time that had happened at the NEA. In many ways it was a real acknowledgment from the federal government that this field deserved its own panels, its own criteria, and its own adjudicators. That recognition helped strengthen the field and made it clear to others how seriously the NEA regarded artist communities and how worthy these programs were of funding. It’s not a long story, but it remains one of the highlights of my career—working with the board, staff, and executive directors across artist communities, and having a small hand, alongside many others, in helping to support the field and its importance. I was actually looking at the ACA website today, and I was so happy to see that it’s still thriving and still very strong. It’s fiercely independent—and I love that.”
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Mario Garcia Durham
Vice President, Arts Consulting Group
In October 2011, Mario Garcia Durham became the fifth President and CEO of the Association of Performing Arts Professionals (APAP) since its founding in 1957. After nine years of successful leadership, he completed a planned departure and leadership transition in June of 2020. He is currently an independent consultant.
Prior to his leadership role with APAP, Mr. Durham was at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) where he served as Director of Artist Communities & Presenting from 2004 –2011. At the NEA, Mr. Durham contributed to programs such as the NEA Opera Honors and An Evening of Poetry, hosted by President and Mrs. Obama. He inaugurated the NEA’s Artist Communities granting program and was the initiator of Live from Your Neighborhood, a groundbreaking study of the impact of outdoor arts festivals in the U.S. After holding numerous performing arts management positions at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in the 1990s, he founded Yerba Buena Arts & Events, the producing organization of the annual Yerba Buena Gardens Festival. Since its inception in 2000, the festival has presented 42,000+ artists, commissioned 75+ new works and reached over 2 million+ attendees.
Throughout his career of more than 20 years as a performing arts professional, Mr. Durham has served on numerous boards, special advisory committees and funding panels. He was the chair of the board of the Alliance of Artist Communities. Mr. Durham served as the chair of the Performing Arts Alliance, a board of the leaders of the major performing arts service organizations in the U.S. He is also on the board of SMU DataArts. He is the chair of the board of the Sitar Arts Center and just joined the board of the American Craft Council. He is also on the Advisory Council for the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival in San Francisco.
In 2022 he received the Fan Taylor Award, one of the Presenting Field’s highest honors, and in 2023 he received the Halsey and Alice North national award for exemplary service as a board member alumnus. A graduate of the University of Houston, Durham is passionate about a broad range of performing arts and evolving forms of performance and media arts.
We’d love to hear from you. Send your questions or reflections to ebasada@artistcommunities.org for a chance to be featured in an upcoming issue of our newsletter, Waypoints.