Dr. Anne Kinney grew up in a house designed by Frank Loyd Wright in a small town in southwestern Wisconsin. Her father had been the communications officer on the mine sweeper Inaugural in the Pacific during World War II, where he learned to navigate by the stars. He was always looking up into the dark skies of rural Wisconsin and pointing out the constellations, which stirred her early interest in astronomy. Dr Kinney pursued her interest at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she received a degree in physics and astronomy. After several years study at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen she settled in Greenwitch Village, where she earned her Ph.D. in physics at New York University (working in the reverse direction as that taken by Dr. Gallagher).

Dr. Kinney works on many topics surrounding both normal and active galaxies. Currently, she is using a number of different telescopes at a number of different wavebands to understand the accretion disks which supply active galaxies with their source of energy. Although she has recently observed on telescopes in Chile, Hawaii, New Mexico, Arizona, and in space, she is much chagrinned that her father still knows the constellations better than she does.