Charles A. Riley II, PhD is an arts journalist, curator and professor at the City University of New York. He is the author of twenty-eight books on art, architecture and public policy, including The Art of Lincoln Center (Wiley), as well as the essay for the recently published Opera Portraits, an art project that involved photographing singers backstage at major opera houses. He has also written The Jazz Age in France, The Art of Peter Max, Arthur Carter, Ben Schonzeit (all published by Abrams) as well as Aristocracy and the Modern Imagination, The Saints of Modern Art, and Color Codes (all from the University Press of New England), and Sacred Sister (in collaboration with the noted avant-garde theater director Robert Wilson). He is curator-at-large at the Nassau County Museum of Art and has presented exhibitions devoted to Picasso, Surrealism and contemporary art, and has written dozens of exhibition catalogue essays and his articles on art have appeared in several magazines, including Art & Auction, Art & Antiques and Antiques and Fine Art. He is a former reporter for Fortune magazine and former editor-in-chief of WE magazine, and has participated in cultural policy and educational think tanks internationally. A graduate (summa cum laude) of Princeton University, he received his PhD from The Graduate Center of City University of New York. He resides in Manhattan and Cutchogue, New York.