Alan Goldfarb was born in New York City in 1959. He grew up in Armonk, New York, a suburban town in easy proximity to the museums and art galleries in Manhattan that spurred his interest in the arts at a young age. Alan developed his artistic practice by working with clay until a janitorial job in a glassblower’s studio redirected his attention toward glass. After graduating Byram Hills High School in 1977, he completed a two-year degree at the School for American Crafts at Rochester Institute of Technology. A desire to pursue glass at a professional level prompted him to relocate to the west coast for a short while, arriving first in Seattle and settling in the Bay area as a glass apprentice. He then returned to RIT to work as a glass teaching assistant, before moving to Burlington, VT in the winter of 1982–83 and opening his own glass studio. In 1991, Goldfarb studied with Venetian glassmaker Lino Tagliapietra at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Maine, and enrolled in workshops at Pilchuck Glass School to study with Dale Chihuly, Dante Marioni, Dick Marquis, William Warmus, and Tagliapietra again. His work was included in New Glass Review 19, published by The Corning Museum of Glass in 1998, and he taught in the CMoG studio in the winter of 2000 followed shortly thereafter by a CMoG residency. His work is in the collection of the MFA Boston and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Goldfarb closed his studio in 2006 and retired to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.