Timothy Long is a distinguished conductor, pianist, and composer of Muscogee and Choctaw descent who is Artistic and Music Director of Opera at Eastman School of Music and an assistant conductor at the Metropolitan Opera. He is an enrolled citizen of both the Muscogee Nation and the Thlopthlocco Tribal Town, and he is matrilineally Choctaw.

At the age of 16, Tim 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.

His 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.

After early years playing as a violinist in the Oklahoma City Philharmonic, Tim’s passion for symphonic conducting 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 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, City Opera Vancouver, The Juilliard School, Yale Opera, the New York City Opera, and off-Broadway with The New Group.

As a pianist and harpsichordist, Tim has performed throughout the world 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 Oregon Bach Festival, the Aspen Music Festival, the Caramoor Festival, and the Dame Myra Hess Series in Chicago, among many others.

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. He conducted the American Premiere at Anchorage Opera last season. This extraordinary composition is the first opera to be sung in both the Gitxsan and English languages.

Recent highlights include Handel’s Semele for Wolf Trap Opera, and the In Harmony: Side by Side series with the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra at Lincoln Center. This season includes Silent Light by Paola Prestini and Royce Vavrek, and H&G by Allen Shawn, Anna Maria Hong and Jean Randich, for Eastman Opera Theatre. After joining the Metropolitan Opera last season as an assistant conductor for X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X and the Lindemann Young Artist Development Program’s Orchestra Workshop, he will return this season for Puccini’s La Bohème, and Antony and Cleopatra by John Adams.

2024 marks the World Premiere of Tim’s project, The North American Indigenous Songbook. As president of The Plimpton Foundation, Tim created this project to establish a repertoire where none existed before. Each year, the foundation is commissioning eight Native American, First Nations, and Métis composers to write songs that are available for all to sing. National Sawdust has partnered with The Plimpton Foundation to present these premieres. The first round of composers include R. Carlos Nakai, Dawn Avery, Raven Chacon, Sage Bond, Charles Shadle, Timothy Archambault, Connor Chee, and Martha Redbone.

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 (2017 Naxos), the Opera America Songbook (Opera America, 2012), and The Music Teacher (Bridge Records, 2008), starring Wallace Shawn, Parker Posey, and Elizabeth Berkley. He has appeared on NPR’s More Than Music, CBC’s Saturday Afternoon at the Opera, NBC’s Today Show, and CBS Sunday Morning.

Tim is passionate about his role as president of The Plimpton Foundation (theplimptonfoundation.org), which promotes the work of Native American and First Nations performing artists through scholarships, grants, and commissions. He is proud to be on the Board of Directors of OPERA America, and is a 2024 inductee into the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame.