Michelle Hensley is artistic director of the Minneapolis-based theater company Ten Thousand Things, where she has directed and produced over 60 tours of award-winning drama to nontraditional audiences, in locations which included prisons, shelters, and housing projects. A 2002 McKnight Foundation theater fellow, Hensley is a founding member of the Minnesota Theater Alliance, and serves on the boards of the Theatre Communications Group and HowlRound. She has received the Francesca Primus Prize from the American Theatre Critics Association for outstanding contribution to American theater by a female artist, and she is the author of All the Lights On: Reimagining Theater with Ten Thousand Things (2016). In 2017, Hensley served as a panelist in Performance.