Welcome GAAP Cohort 3
Rodrigo Ehecatl Duran
Rodrigo Ehecatl Durán (he/him) is a cultural leader, community advocate, and Director of Carnaval San Francisco, the producer of California's largest and longest-running multicultural parade and festival. A native San Franciscan and the son of Mexican immigrants, Durán has dedicated his career to advancing cultural preservation, community engagement, and equitable representation for communities of color.
Before becoming Director of Carnaval San Francisco, Durán served as Marketing Director for the Calle 24 Latino Cultural District, where he worked to support local businesses, artists, and cultural institutions in the Mission District. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he helped coordinate Mission Food Hub operations that provided thousands of families with culturally relevant groceries each week. Through Carnaval, he continues to celebrate and sustain the vibrant Latino, Caribbean, and African Diaspora traditions that define the San Francisco Bay Area's cultural life.
Since 2022, Rodrigo has served as a KQED Community Advisory Panel member to support, give feedback and engage KQED staff and board in community building. From June of 2023 to May of 2025 he served as a Commissioner for the San Francisco Human Rights Commission.
He is a proud husband to a benevolent Nicaraguan woman and a fortunate father to an inquisitive daughter.
What led you to apply for GAAP?
I applied for GAAP because I want to build on my experience in grassroots cultural organizing and learn how to turn that work into lasting policy change. Through my work with Carnaval San Francisco, I have seen firsthand how policies around public funding, housing, and cultural district planning can either support our artists and cultural spaces or contribute to their displacement. I want to better understand how these systems work so I can help shape them more directly. This fellowship is an opportunity to strengthen my advocacy skills, learn how to engage with government and decision-makers, and help develop policies that reflect the needs of San Francisco’s artists and cultural workers. Ultimately, I want to help ensure that culture remains accessible, supported, and an essential part of our city’s future.
NiQueen Jones
NiQueen Jones (she/her) is an Oakland-based multidisciplinary artist and cultural worker whose practice explores the histories, living traditions, and evolving futures of the African diaspora. Her lifelong artistic practice spans creative writing, music, dance, and community organizing.
NiQueen serves as the Cultural Arts Network Weaver & Partnerships Manager with the Brotherhood of Elders Network, stewarding the Black Cultural Zone Collaborative. In this role, she is the architect of the 40x40 REACH Grants Program and the 40x40 Living Practice series, initiatives that expand opportunities for artists, foster connection, and strengthen Deep East Oakland's creative landscape. She is also a member of Artist As First Responder (AAFR) Collective, and a former teaching artist and administrator for The People's Conservatory.
Her work is rooted in the belief that arts and culture are essential to individual and collective well-being, self- determination, and the ability to imagine new possibilities.
What led you to apply for GAAP?
As an artist and cultural worker in Oakland, I've witnessed firsthand how investment in arts and culture positively impacts neighborhoods. I've also seen the extraordinary work artists do to preserve cultural memory, bring people together, and create spaces for connection, often with very limited resources. I applied to GAAP because I want to deepen my understanding of how policy is shaped, how funding decisions are made, and how artists can influence those decisions. I believe artists and cultural workers should have a meaningful voice in the policies that affect our lives, livelihoods, and the places we call home.
Shrey Purohit
Shrey Purohit (he/him) is a San Francisco-based painter, curator, and arts advocate from Mumbai, India. He moved to San Francisco in 2018 to study at California College of the Arts, earning his BFA in 2020. His paintings explore the city’s streets and everyday life through questions of labor and belonging.
As Exhibitions and Partnerships Manager at ArtSpan, he leads exhibitions and builds partnerships that connect Bay Area artists with audiences, sales, and paid opportunities. He oversees the SF Open Studios Exhibition, presenting more than 300 artists, and has produced shows at the Ferry Building, Mission Bowling Club, City Hall and neighborhood venues across SF. He managed the Excelsior Art Initiative for two years, placing public art in local businesses and distributing $25,000 in artist stipends. His work spans curation, fundraising, community outreach, budgets, and program management.
Purohit also founded Ingleside Gallery, which has shown more than 100 artists, with a focus on AAPI, queer, and immigrant artists. In 2026, he received a San Francisco Arts Commission Arts Impact Endowment grant for “Unsung SF: Portraits of the Working City.” Across these roles, he works to make artistic opportunity more accessible and help artists remain in the communities they shape.
What led you to apply for GAAP?
San Francisco gave me a community when I arrived alone from Mumbai in 2018. The artists and organizations that helped me find my footing are why I stayed, and why I began advocating. Through painting, running Ingleside Gallery, and working at ArtSpan, I see how much artists give this city and how hard it is for them to remain here. I applied to GAAP because I want to turn that experience into lasting policy change. I’ve learned advocacy by doing it, often responding to a crisis. Now I want the training, mentorship, and relationships to organize earlier and build campaigns that last. My focus is artist housing, but the question underneath it is bigger: how do we make sure the people who create a city’s culture can afford to keep living in it?
Liv Schaffer
Liv Schaffer (she/her) is a social practice artist, choreographer, educator, and intergenerational practitioner working at the intersection of the arts and aging services. Her body-based research centers intergenerational dance as a methodology for strengthening social connection, cultivating belonging and care, advancing age equity, and imagining pluralistic futures.
Liv is a faculty member in the Performing Arts and Social Justice Department at the University of San Francisco, where she teaches contemporary dance and directs Dance Generators, the university’s intergenerational dance company. As Intergenerational Director with EngAGE, Inc., she designs programs that foster reciprocal relationships across generations within affordable housing communities throughout California and Oregon. She has served as a Community Engagement Artist with Jacob’s Pillow since 2014.
Liv holds a BFA from the Alonzo King LINES Ballet Program at Dominican University. She has performed with AXIS Dance Company, DanceWorks Chicago, Robert Moses’ Kin, and Dance Exchange, and her choreography has been presented by Jacob’s Pillow, ODC Theater, Yerba Buena Gardens Festival, RAWdance SF, The Big Muddy Dance Company, and Western Michigan University.
Liv is a 2026–2027 Eisner Prize Fellow, a 2026 Belonging Innovation Lab Narrative Fellow, a 2025 LABA Bay Area Fellow, and a 2021 CoGenerate Gen2Gen Innovation Fellow.
What led you to apply for GAAP?
I applied for GAAP because my work has shown me that ageism is both a cultural issue and a policy issue. As a choreographer leading intergenerational dance programs with people in their teens through their nineties, and as someone who designs programs within affordable senior housing, I see how age segregation shapes the ways we classify artists, distribute opportunities, and imagine whose creative voices matter. As people live longer, our cultural systems must support longer, more viable artistic careers and ensure that older adult artists remain visible, valued, and resourced. I see intergenerational arts practice as a powerful response to social isolation—and as a space where people across ages and lived experiences can create more connected, pluralistic futures together. Through GAAP, I hope to help build the advocacy tools, relationships, and policies needed to make that vision possible.
Shreya Shankar
Shreya Shankar’s (she/they) practice is where ancestral forms and futurisms meet across the mediums of design, policy, mythology, futurism, and worldbuilding. Their work engages collective memory and the radical imagination, seamlessly prototyping across diverse mediums and forms to create functional ritual sculptural art objects, altars, sets, literary and visual art.
With degrees in Environmental Policy, Urban Planning, and Architecture from UC Berkeley and CCA, Shreya Shankar draws from spiritual ecology, folklore, and foresight to explore the rich territory between ancestral cosmologies and liberatory near-futures.
What led you to apply for GAAP?
With GAAP's support, the leading edge gets to be my growing edge. I'm grateful to be in incredible company among my GAAP cohort and alumni, and have guidance to make timely and grounded impact.
What is GAAP?
The Grassroots Artists Advocacy Program (GAAP) is a cohort-based fellowship program for artist advocates that live or work in Oakland or San Francisco. Artist Advocates include diverse artists, culture bearers, and creative workers with a dedicated and committed artistic or cultural practice who directly engage in advocacy and policy development to advance the holistic well-being of the field. GAAP is a program funded by the Kenneth Rainin Foundation and the Walter & Elise Haas Fund.