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.

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.