Timothy Long is a pianist, conductor, and composer who is Artistic and Music Director of Opera at the Eastman School of Music. He is a Muscogee Nation citizen from the Thlopthlocco Tribal Town and is one-half Choctaw on his mother’s side.

Tim’s work on Thomas Adès’s operatic tour-de-force Powder Her Face at the Aspen Music Festival led to his appointment as assistant conductor of the Brooklyn Philharmonic, and he was subsequently named an associate conductor at the New York City Opera for two seasons. This season, he will be joining the conducting staff of the Metropolitan Opera for X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, by Anthony Davis and Thulani Davis.

After an early start playing as a violinist in the Oklahoma City Philharmonic, Tim’s passion for symphonic music has resulted in engagements with the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the Oklahoma City Philharmonic, the Prince George Symphony, the Regina Symphony, the Eastman Philharmonia, the Stony Brook Symphony Orchestra, the Prague Summer Nights Orchestra, the Oregon Bach Festival Orchestra, and the Trondheim Sinfonietta. His operatic conducting engagements have included such companies as Boston Lyric Opera, Wolf Trap Opera, Opera Colorado, Utah Opera, Tulsa Opera, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, Anchorage Opera, Pacific Opera Victoria, The Juilliard School, Yale Opera, the Maryland Opera Studio, the New York City Opera, and off-Broadway with The New Group.

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 (and rising) 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.

In the 2022-2023 season he conducted both Lear on the Second Floor by Allan Havis and Pulitzer Prize recipient Anthony Davis, and Handel’s Alcina for Eastman Opera Theatre, the World Premiere of How Bright the Sunlight by Anthony Davis and the 23rd US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo (Muscogee) with the Eastman Philharmonia, the American Premiere of Missing for his debut at Anchorage Opera and he was guest harpsichordist and conductor with the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia for his debut program entitled Bach’s Legacy. This summer he led Handel’s Semele for Wolf Trap Opera before heading to Tannery Pond Concerts for a recital with acclaimed tenor Karim Sulayman. His summer performances concluded with another debut when he was chosen by the celebrated French conductor Louis Langrée to guest conduct the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra at Lincoln Center for the In Harmony: Side by Side series.

At the age of 16, he made his piano concerto debut with the Oklahoma Symphony Orchestra and has since performed as a soloist with the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, 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.

As a pianist and harpsichordist, Tim has performed at venues such as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Merkin Hall, the Kennedy Center, National Sawdust, the Kimmel Center, 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.

Tim’s recordings include Alburnum, with internationally renowned baritone Brian Mulligan (Bright Shiny Things, 2022), Beauty Intolerable: Songs of Sheila Silver (Albany Records, 2021), the American Classics recording of Dominick Argento song cycles with Brian Mulligan (Naxos, 2017), the Opera America Songbook (Opera America, 2012), and The Music Teacher (Bridge Records, 2008), starring Wallace Shawn, Parker Posey, and Elizabeth Berkley.

Tim is passionate about his work with The Plimpton Foundation (theplimptonfoundation.org) which promotes the work of Native American and underrepresented performing artists through scholarships, grants, and commissions. He lives in Rochester, NY and Montclair, NJ with his husband, baritone Christopher Dylan Herbert, and their sweet basset hound mix, Pumpkin.