Michelle Hensley is the founding artistic director of Ten Thousand Things Theater, where she directed and produced over seventy tours of award-winning drama to low-income audiences in prisons, shelters, housing projects and rural communities as well as for the general public. Most productions made local critics' annual Outstanding Production lists, including Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan, Greek tragedies like The Furies, Electra and Antigone, Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, The Tempest, Richard III, Twelfth Night and Othello, and musicals like The Unsinkable Molly Brown, The Most Happy Fella, Ragtime, and The Little Shop of Horrors. Now retired, in 2017, Michelle received the Twin Cities Ivey Award for Lifetime Achievement, and TCG's Visionary Leadership Award in 2018.  She is a founder of the Minnesota Theater Alliance, served on the boards of TCG and Howlround, and is the author of All The Lights On, a book on her discoveries about theater through Ten Thousand Things.