Dandelion Arts Finance Training Program

Afia Thompson

Afia “Beautiful One” Thompson received her acclaim 20 years ago in West African dance. She has performed nationally and internationally in genres including jazz, hip-hop, lindy hop, freestyle, and modern dance. Her company Bahiya Movement has participated in SF Juneteenth, Black Choreographers, and Mbongui Square. Recently their piece iNdigo Skin: In Fear of Black Fruit, placed 2nd at Luna Dance Studio ChoreoFund 7 in Berkeley. She has graced the stages of The Palace of Fine Arts, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and Oakland’s Art and Soul Festivals. She continues to teach classes in the Oakland community to professional dancers and dance enthusiast of all ages.

Mason Smith

Mason J. (they/he/him/them) is a Blaxican-Indigenous historian, visual/performing artist, educator, and cultural worker born, raised, and residing in Ramaytush-Ohlone territory/San Francisco, CA. They are coeditor of Still Here SF (Foglifter Press, 2019) and author of the poetry chapbook Crossbones on My Life (Nomadic Press, 2021). In addition to receiving fellowships from VONA Voices and the SFPL James C. Hormel LGBTQ Center, Mason sits on the GLBT Historical Society Board and was a past board member of the world's first Transgender Cultural District based in San Francisco. Mason currently serves as interim Executive Director at RADAR Productions.

Sabereh Kashi

Sabereh Kashi (she/her) is an immigrant documentary filmmaker and cultural strategist. Her most recent work, I’m Oakland (2022), created in collaboration with the City, is a short documentary about an African American woman homeowner facing gentrification. She is a concept and social media developer for Shahrazad Squad, a MENASA women community space. Kashi’s debut, the 35mm documentary Lalezar Street (2000) premiered at Fadjr International Film Festival, Iran. She directed a web series about Iranian immigrant artists in North America (2008-2016). Her editorial work has premiered at Hot Docs and IDFA. She edited and co-wrote the ITVS documentary Our Summer in Tehran (2011), and the award-winning short Surviving International Boulevard: Domestic Sex Trafficking in Oakland (2016). Her current film, and long time passion project, The Patient Woman, depicts her personal journey of searching for "home" between Iran and America. She has won a Center for Cultural Innovation’s Investing in Artists award, a Berkeley Film Foundation grant, and a student Emmy Award. She was a resident artist at SFFilm and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. She co-founded Re-Present Media, a nonprofit that advocates for personal stories of under-represented communities in nonfiction media. When not working, she practices Capoeira and organizes home-ownership for intentional communities.

Violet Vasquez

Violeta Vasquez (comrade/homie) is a youth leader and spoken word artist from the Lakeview and Bayview communities, with deep roots across San Francisco. For nearly a decade, she has gained experience in a variety of social justice programs. She is dedicated to cultivating leadership and skills among her peers, which have evolved her understanding of systemic injustice and resilience. While pursuing higher education at City College of San Francisco, she contributed to developing a youth-centered approach to our program mentorship model. She facilitates programs and creates curricula to encourage self-expression and solidarity with asset-based approaches to invoke healing and empowerment, at both the individual and community level. Violeta is the result of many contributions made by family including community members, nonprofit organizations, and Ethnic Studies.

Crystal Mason

Crystal Mason (they/them) is an activist, artist, cultural worker and consultant who works to create space for imagining, conjuring and sharing our dreams. Crystal has been dreaming and making possible a world that puts the talents, stories, and art made by and for intergenerational QTBIPOC artists in the limelight for decades. They are a co-founder, along with Queerly Complex, of Queering Dreams, a new art, care and community-expanding network that’s collectively dreaming & creating our liberation from all oppressive systems and systems of domination. They have over 25 years experience in Arts Administration and programming. They were formerly Co-Director of Queer Rebels an intergenerational QTBIPOC performing arts organization and a board member since 2012. Crystal was also a co-founder and Artistic Director of Luna Sea Women’s Performance Project. They spent time as the Executive Director of the Jon Sims Center for the Arts. Until recently they lived and worked for 8 years in an intergenerational, multiracial mixed gender queer and trans centered low-income housing project.

Jericha Senyak

Jericha Senyak (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist and financial consultant who still can't quite figure out how she ended up in the weird world of accounting. As a consultant, she works with artists and arts organizations across Northern California to help them expand their financial empowerment and leverage financial tools and skills on their own terms. As an artist, she likes to build strange immersive spaces out of cardboard and papier mâché. She lives in the woods of Siskiyou County, traditional homeland of the Winnemem Wintu people, where you can usually find her dancing tango, cooking with dangerous amounts of butter, and trying not to kill her vast bevy of houseplants. She is grateful to be part of a widening network of artists working together to fight pervasive myths about finance and the arts.

Jason Wyman

I am Queerly Complex, an anti-binary social practice artist living & creating on Yelamu, unceded Ramaytush Ohlone land, or what colonizers named San Francisco, and I’ve been Queerly Complex my whole life. I’m the one that stood out and apart from everyone else was hella teased because of it. I even got my tailbone broken in a game of “Smear the Queer” in the sixth grade and had to sit on a shit-brown, donut-shaped pillow for six months.

On August 28, 2007, I launched a blog called Queerly Complex. I shared deeply intimate portraits, from my “Piss Trigger” to “The Fight with the Knife,” of my queer life. It was radical honesty as artistic expression. It was also a call for me to create my home.

Now, I create virtual & physical spaces for comrades to explore & discover who they be individually & collectively. My materials are dreams, value(s), structures, & access, and I use them to conjure renewed forms of being and belonging free from shame, conformity, and punishment. My practice centers the messy, intangible, emotive, & esoteric bits that help us understand and make-meaning of the chaos within which we exist. And it’s resulted in a large-scale, participatory sticker mural with artists Celi Tamayo-Lee & Mary-Claire Amable for the Asian Art Museum, a national Youth Media Network co-produced with Myah Overstreet, and Queering Dreams, an intergenerational, cross-territorial non-profit network of artists, neighbors, & comrades dreaming & co-creating our liberation from oppressive systems, with Crystal Mason.