Lynne Conner, Chair and Associate Professor of the Department of Theater and Dance at Colby College, is a theatre and dance historian, playwright and arts consultant. Her major publications include the books Pittsburgh in Stages: Two Hundred Years of Theater, Spreading the Gospel of the Modern Dance: Newspaper Dance Criticism in the United States, 1850-1935, and In the Garden of Live Flowers (co-authored with Attilio Favorini) and a chapter on audience behavior in the recently published Engaging Art: The Next Great Transformation of America’s Cultural Life (co-edited by Steven Tepper and William Ivey). As the principal investigator for The Heinz Endowments’ Arts Experience Initiative, she has been invited to lecture on the topic for the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance, Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Boston Foundation’s Public Forum, the International Society for the Performing Arts, Southwest Arts Conference, Grantmakers in the Arts, Dance USA, the American Symphony Orchestra League, the Bolz Center for Arts Administration at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and the Heinz School at Carnegie Mellon University. She was recently selected as a Salzburg Seminar Fellow for “Cultural Institutions Without Walls: New Models of Arts-Community Interaction” and in October 2007 joined an international group of artists, cultural managers, and public sector representatives to identify new models of arts and community interaction. Dr. Conner is also an award-winning playwright (including the 2002 Kennedy Center/ATHE David Mark Cohen National Playwriting Award and a Jane Chambers 2002 Honorable Mention Award) whose plays have been produced across the country.