During her fourth and final season as music director of the Kansas City Symphony, Anne Manson will also conduct the Indianapolis Symphony, the New Jersey Symphony, the Hong Kong Philharmonic and the Residentie Orchestra of The Hague. In addition she has recently led the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Honolulu Symphony, the Utah Symphony and the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, among others. In Europe her guest engagements have included a production of Carlisle Floyd's Susannah with the Geneva Opera and debuts with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Scharoun Ensemble (drawn from the Berlin Philharmonic), the Weimar Staatsoper and Stockholm's Royal Opera.

From 1988-98, Manson was music director of the London-based Mecklenburgh Opera, where she initiated an adventuresome repertory of twentieth-century works alongside such operas as Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro, Cosi fan tutte and The Magic Flute. In addition to reviving rarities such as Victor Ullmann's The Emperor of Atlantis and Udo Zimmermann's Die Weisse Rose, she conducted the world premiere of a newly commissioned work by Martin Butler, Craig's Progress, in 1994. That same year, she made history by becoming the first woman to conduct at the Salzburg Festival, leading an acclaimed performance of Boris Godunov with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and a cast including Samuel Ramey and Philip Langridge.

Anne Manson has performed regularly with the Ensemble Intercontemporain and the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, and made a return appearance with the Vienna Chamber Orchestra for its fiftieth anniversary concert. Other notable engagements have included her BBC Proms debut in 1996 in an all-Weill program that included the complete Seven Deadly Sins and several performances of Henze's song cycle Voices (including one at the Berlin Biennale). She has also appeared with the London Mozart Players, the BBC Scottish Symphony, the Northern Sinfonia, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the Bournemouth Sinfonietta, Madrid's RTVE Orchestra, the Norwegian Radio Orchestra and the Orquesta Sinfonica de Tenerife.

Manson's operatic engagements have included successful productions of Conrad Susa's Dangerous Liaisons and Barber's Vanessa with the Washington Opera; Weill's Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny with the Netherlands Touring Opera; and Don Pasquale and Don Giovanni with the English Touring Opera. During the 1992-93 season she conducted the first performances of Nicola Lefanu's opera Blood Wedding in a production mounted by the Women's Playhouse Trust. She also made her debut at deSingel in Antwerp in Il Combattimento, a triple bill of operas by Monteverdi and Judith Wier that was repeated in Brussels at the Theatre de la Monnaie. She has worked closely with Claudio Abbado, assisting him in the Salzburg Festival's new production of Janacek's From the House of the Dead as well as in Boris Godunov at the Vienna State Opera and a recording of Lohengrin for Deutsche Grammophon.

A graduate in music from Radcliffe College at Harvard University, Anne Manson also studied at King's College, London, and at the Royal College of Music under Norman Del Mar and James Lockhard on a Marshall Scholarship. She subsequently became a Fellow in Conducting at the Royal Northern College of Music and won all of the major conducting prizes both there and at the Royal College of Music. Currently, Manson resides with her family in Kansas City and London.