Tom Healy comes from a family of cops and farmers. He left the dirt roads of Mount Vision, NY in his family’s pick-up truck to study philosophy at Harvard.
A veteran of the New York art scene, Healy opened one of the first art galleries in Chelsea, showing many young artists who went on to prominence, including Tom Sachs, Janet Cardiff, Kara Walker and Karen Finley. He also served as president of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, where he led rebuilding efforts for the downtown arts community after 9/11.
Healy is a visiting fellow at the Goreé Institute in Dakar and a lecturer at Pratt in Brooklyn, where he teaches a seminar on the musical obsessions of writers. His poems and essays about contemporary artists have appeared in the Paris Review, Yale Review, BOMB, Salmagundi, Tin House, Drunken Boat and other journals. He serves on the boards of Creative Time and Poets House.
Healy collects contemporary art, flies small planes, but no longer owns a Ducati. He has traveled extensively on international microfinance projects and AIDS prevention efforts and was a member of President Clinton’s White House Council on AIDS.
In 1993, before losing to Rudy Giuliani, then New York City Mayor David Dinkins introduced Healy to his life partner, Fred Hochberg. Dinkins frequently says that the Healy-Hochberg match is the one good thing that came of that election. Healy divides his time between New York and Miami and now Washington, where Hochberg is Chairman of the United States Export-Import Bank.
