Gary Faigin, co-Founder and Artistic Director of Gage Academy of Art in Seattle, trained at the Art Students League of New York and l'École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris.

While living in New York (1976-1991), Faigin taught figure drawing at the Art Students League when his teacher Robert Beverly Hale retired, a program he presented continuously over the next decade. Concurrently, he taught Perspective and Portrait Drawing at the newly founded New York Academy of Art, plus the National Academy School of Design, the School of Visual Art and Parsons School of Design. He opened his own studio in Hell's Kitchen focused on drawing self-portraits and painting still lifes.

In the summer of 1984, Faigin began a ten-year summer residence in Santa Fe, NM, a locale that afforded him exposure to the burgeoning realist painting scene of the Southwest. His works included pastel landscapes and printmaking with shows at the Frank Croft and  Realist Art galleries.

Faigin has exhibited widely with solo exhibitions in Seattle and Santa Fe, including retrospectives of his work at Seattle’s Frye Art Museum and the Coos Museum of Art in Oregon. A master of drawing and painting, his images explore his two favorite themes: altering one’s perception of the commonplace and developing mood through intense contrasts of light and dark.

As a promoter and observer of historic and contemporary art in the Northwest, Faigin serves on the Board of Directors of the  Cascadia Art Museum in Edmonds and previously wrote art criticism for KUOW - Seattle's NPR station, and the Seattle Times.