[1] Born in New London, Connecticut, Long started off as a lecturer and research fellow at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and got her PhD in 1968 at Yale University while working as a lecturer in art history at Queens College, City University of New York, where she would eventually become professor emeritus.
A 1983 Guggenheim Fellow, she specializes in German expressionism and Wassily Kandinsky, and has written on both subjects, including the books Kandinsky: The Development of an Abstract Style and German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism.
[2] She was one of the three daughters of Alice (née Gordon) and Abram A. Washton (né Watchinsky), a Jewish Columbia-educated lawyer in New London who was chair of the city's Democratic Town Committee and boxed for the Dartmouth Big Green.
[6] In 1967, Long began working at Queens College, City University of New York as a lecturer in art history, and was promoted to assistant professor in 1969.
"[2] In 1995, she published German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism, a book on the German expressionism movement during the Weimar era, as part of UC Press' Documents of Twentieth Century Art series.