Michelle Hensley My journey with Ten Thousand Things unfolded from the kernel of a desire to connect deeply with the audience, an audience who would care passionately about the big stories of human struggle that theater has to tell. I first found that audience in a homeless shelter, where we performed The Good Person of Szechwan. For the past seventeen years, I have traveled through shelter cafeterias, prison gyms, and community rooms, armed with Shakespeare, Aeschylus, Brecht and Irene Fornes, working with the best actors and theater artists in the region, to connect, through the imaginative world of theater, with those whom society teaches are very different. This journey has led to surprising discoveries about what really makes theater work -- discoveries I honestly don't think I could have made by directing on conventional stages. I love the clarity, urgency, depth and honesty that first-time theater audiences, many of whom have lived their lives at the same extremes as the characters in our plays, demand of me. I love the immediacy simplicity that our bare-bones performance conditions demand of me, and the delightful inventiveness in staging that results, with no audience members sitting in a dark house. I love the challenge to the sense of our differences that happens when a corporate CEO sits next to a homeless man to watch one of our plays, as equals, as so rarely happens in our world; I love the surprising threads of commonality that emerge between such "different" audience members during the performance. People often ask me if I don't want to direct in a "real" theater. I respond: To me, this is as real as theater gets. Each time I take on a tour, I get another surprising lesson in just what theater is, from audiences who do not take theater for granted. Since 1990, Michelle Hensley, artistic director and founder of Ten Thousand Things, has directed and produced 35 TTT tours to low-income audiences. Most have made local critics annual Top Ten lists, including Brecht's The Good Person of Szechwan, Behn's The Emperor of the Moon, The Furies by Aeschylus, Berger's The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol, Willson's The Unsinkable Molly Brown, Loesser's The Most Happy Fella, and Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, The Tempest and Cymbeline. In just the last four years, her productions of Cyrano de Bergerac, Emily Mann's Antigone, Ragtime, The Merchant of Venice, Little Shop of Horrors and Richard III were named the Outstanding Small Theater Production or the Outstanding Small Theater Musical of the Year by the Star Tribune. A graduate of Princeton University, with an M.F.A in Directing from UCLA, she was awarded a 2000 Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship and a 2002 McKnight Artist Fellowship. She was also named City Pages 2001 Theater Artist of the Year, City Pages 2004 Best Director, and the 2005 winner of the Francesca Primus Prize, given by the American Theater Critics Association for outstanding contribution to the American theater by an emerging female artist