Charles Long ’81

Charles Long earned his undergraduate degree in Painting in 1981 from the Philadelphia College of Art, now The University of the Arts. He is an artist best known for his collaborative works with the British pop band Stereolab, which revived 1960s electronic music. From 1995 to 2000, he worked with the band to produce interactive, audio-sculptural installations. These included The Amorphous Body Study Center, in which viewers participated by wearing headphones connected to objects such as couches and cushions and listening to the music of Stereolab.

Since 2003, he has returned to his early focus on  immobile, abstracted sculptural objects and assemblages that combine found objects, debris and materials such as plaster, steel and papier-mâché. Such a work is his “Soundly Through the Noise” (above).

Mr. Long received an M.F.A. from Yale University, and is currently a featured artist at the Whitney Biennal 2008. He has also participated in group exhibitions in Japan, Australia, Sweden and various U.S. venues.

Mr. Long has been described as “an incredibly talented artist who combines delicacy with conceptual rigor,” and whose work has “a fantastic lyrical quality.”

Jackson Grace Gay ’99

Jackson Gay is an award-winning theater director who graduated from The University of the Arts in 1999 with a BFA in acting. She received her MFA in directing from the Yale School of Drama.

Among her directing credits are Tennessee Williams’ “Glass Menagerie” at the Guggenheim Museum as part of the “Works & Process” series; Lucy Thurber’s “Scarcity” at the Atlantic Theater Company, where she previously directed Kia Corthron’s “Master Disaster” and Rolin Jones’ “The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow,” which was selected as a 2006 Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Ms. Gay’s guest directing and teaching credits include the Juilliard School, Yale University, Guthrie Theater, Dartmouth College, Stern College for Women, Denver Center’s National Theatre Conservatory, Mount Holyoke College and New York University. She is the recipient of the Voice and Vision Envision Fellowship, the Jonathan Alper Directing Fellowship at Manhattan Theatre Club, the Williamstown Theater Festival Directing Fellowship and the Drama League’s New Directors/New Works Fellowship.