Anne Katz is executive director of Arts Wisconsin, Wisconsin’s independent statewide community arts action, service, and development organization, whose mission is to nurture, serve, promote, and speak up for the arts in Wisconsin and all of its communities. She guides Arts Wisconsin’s programs and activities, serves Wisconsin’s diverse and ever-expanding creative community, and advocates and builds partnerships in the public and private sectors for the arts and creative industries on the local level.

Under her leadership, Arts Wisconsin received the 2004 Governor’s Award in Support of the Arts from the Wisconsin Foundation for the Arts. Anne was an Arts Administration Fellow at the National Endowment for the Arts in 1988, and was a member of the 2014-2015 class of National Arts Strategies’ Chief Executive Program, a global leadership program focused on community cultural development. She has also received the Alene Valkanas Arts Advocacy Award from Americans for the Arts, the “Service to Music” Award from the Association of Wisconsin Symphony Orchestras, and the Wisconsin Visual Art Achievement Award, and has been recognized as one of the 25 most powerful arts leaders in the country, according to “Barry’s Blog.”

Anne is a nationally sought after speaker and has been a review panelist for numerous local, state, regional and national grant programs, from the Dane County Cultural Affairs Commission to the National Endowment for the Arts. She serves on the board of directors of the Wisconsin Public Radio Association, Leadership Wisconsin, and the Wisconsin Downtown Action Council and is a past chair of the State Arts Action Council, the national network of statewide arts service and advocacy organizations affiliated with Americans for the Arts.   She co-taught the inaugural UW-Madison course on creative placemaking, in partnership with the UW-Madison Bolz Center for Arts Administration, in summer 2018.  She is a graduate of Brandeis University and studied drama at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, England.