Timothy Long, is a pianist, conductor, and composer of Muscogee, Thlopthlocco, and Choctaw descent, who is Artistic and Music Director of Opera at the Eastman School of Music.

After working on Thomas Adès’s operatic tour-de-force Powder Her Face at the Aspen Music Festival, Tim was appointed by Robert Spano to be his assistant conductor for three years at the Brooklyn Philharmonic, and he was subsequently named an associate conductor at the New York City Opera for two seasons.

His early training as a pianist and violinist led to work with singers, and eventually to conducting engagements that have included companies such as Boston Lyric Opera, Wolf Trap Opera, Opera Colorado, Utah Opera, Tulsa Opera, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, Anchorage Opera, Pacific Opera Victoria, City Opera Vancouver, Shreveport Opera, The Juilliard School, Yale Opera, the New York City Opera, and off-broadway with The New Group. Symphonic work has been with the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the Oklahoma City Philharmonic, the Prince George Symphony, the Regina Symphony, the Eastman Philharmonia, the Prague Summer Nights Orchestra, the Oregon Bach Festival Orchestra, and the Trondheim Sinfonietta.

At City Opera Vancouver, Tim conducted the 2017 World Premiere of Missing, a groundbreaking new work by Marie Clements and Brian Current about the 5,000 missing Indigenous women in Canada. In 2019, he conducted a Canadian tour of Missing with Pacific Opera Victoria, the Regina Symphony Orchestra, and the Prince George Symphony Orchestra. This extraordinary composition is the first opera to be sung in both the Gitxsan and English languages. These shows reached out with private performances for the Indigenous victims’ families, and offered traditional sacred healing to all audience members.

In the 2022-2023 season he has conducted both Lear on the Second Floor by Anthony Davis and Allan Havis, and Handel’s Alcina for Eastman Opera Theatre, the World Premiere of Bright is the Sunlight by Anthony Davis and Joy Harjo with the Eastman Philharmonia, the American Premiere of Missing at Anchorage Opera, and was guest harpsichordist and conductor with the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia for a program entitled Bach’s Legacy. In the summer, he will be leading Handel’s Semele for Wolf Trap Opera before heading to Tannery Pond Concerts for a recital with acclaimed tenor Karim Sulayman. His summer performances will conclude with a debut, conducting the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra at Lincoln Center.

Tim has performed as a pianist and harpsichordist at venues such as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Merkin Hall, the Kennedy Center, National Sawdust, Jordan Hall, Wigmore Hall in London, the Alte Oper in Frankfurt, Herkules Hall in Munich, Dvořák Hall in Prague, La Halle aux Grains in Toulouse, the Mostly Modern Festival, the Moab Music Festival, the Oregon Bach Festival, the Aspen Music Festival, the Caramoor Festival, and the Dame Myra Hess Series in Chicago, among many others. As a concerto soloist he has performed with the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, the Oklahoma Symphony Orchestra, the Lawton (OK) Philharmonic, the Beethoven Society Orchestra of Washington DC, the Sociedad Filarmonica de Conciertos of Mexico City, the Oklahoma Summer Arts Institute Orchestra, the Eastman School Symphony Orchestra, and the Eastman Philharmonia.

In 2017, Naxos released Tim’s recording of the Dominick Argento song cycles, The Andrée Expedition and From the Diary of Virginia Woolf, with the internationally renowned baritone Brian Mulligan. Their partnership has been highly lauded, with the Washington Post stating about their 2018 Kennedy Center recital, “Long’s collaboration at the piano was so sympathetically symbiotic that it seemed, both in Walden and in Dominick Argento’s From the Diary of Virginia Woolf in the program’s second half, that a single musical intelligence was at work.” Previous recordings include The Music Teacher (Bridge Records), an opera within a play starring Wallace Shawn, Parker Posey, and Elizabeth Berkley, and the Opera America Songbook (Opera America). He appeared on the 2021 recording of Beauty Intolerable: Songs of Sheila Silver (Albany Records), and Alburnum (Bright Shiny Things), a recording of the music of Mason Bates, Gregory Spears, and Missy Mazzoli, with Brian Mulligan, was released in November of 2022.

At the Moab Music Festival, Tim recently made his debut as a composer with piano pieces reflecting his Muscogee heritage. He is on the Board of Directors of The Plimpton Foundation, whose mission is to bring scholarships and commissions to Native American musicians. He lives in Rochester, NY and New Jersey with his husband, baritone Christopher Dylan Herbert, and their sweet basset hound mix, Pumpkin.