Long Center Executive Director Cliff Redd has enthusiastically advocated for the arts since returning to Austin four-and-a-half years ago.

A 57-year-old Texan of Scottish descent, Redd arrived in the state’s capital city to take charge of a moribund capital campaign to raise $77 million to build the Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Center for the Performing Arts.

The project had been scaled back from an earlier plan and now was to involve an adaptive reuse of the late 1950s-era Palmer Municipal Auditorium.  But following the dot-com bust earlier this decade, fund-raising had flagged.

Enter Redd, who lived in Austin twice before, graduating from Lanier High School on the stage of Palmer itself before attending Southwestern University and The University of Texas at Austin, then proceeding to found his own theatre company in Arlington at the age of 20.

For more than 30 years, Redd remained in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, continuing to nurture his Theatre Arlington and serving successively as artistic director and executive producer of the Shakespeare Festival of Dallas, executive director of The 500, Inc., a Dallas-based organization raising funds for local arts groups, and executive director of the ArtCentre of Plano, which is where the Long Center search team found him in 2004.

In Austin, Redd quickly became the city’s best known arts advocate as he worked tirelessly to raise tens of millions of dollars to construct and maintain the Long Center, which opened earlier this year.

In the meantime, Redd has set the vision for what the new community-funded center will be – a place where everyone and everything comes together, including performance groups large and small; mainstream and not; African American and Latino-influenced as well as Anglo-based; presenting film as well as music and dance, and internationally known performers as well as local and regional presenters; and every other possible combination, including steady use by corporations, individuals and civic organizations for all manner of meetings and events.

Says Redd, “If we haven’t built a place where everyone sees themselves and feels completely comfortable, we’ve built the wrong place.”

In building that place, Redd has not only helped raise the millions needed by the Long Center but he has helped energize the arts community.  And in a city that prides itself on its accepting attitude, he has become a leader in advocating the broadest possible range of performance art.