Anna Lou Dehavenon

Anna Lou Dehavenon (formerly Kapell; November 24, 1926 – February 28, 2012) was an urban anthropologist.

She was born in Bellingham, Washington as Rebecca Ann Lou Melson, she grew up in Portland, Oregon and had attended Reed College for two years before moving first to Chicago, then to New York, where she lived for 60 years. She originally studied piano; she was a student of Sergei Tarnowsky, the teacher of Vladimir Horowitz. She earned her doctorate degree in anthropology in 1978 from Columbia University, and taught at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

In the 1980s and 1990s, she served as an expert witness for the Legal Aid Society and the Coalition for the Homeless. The Community Service Society presented Dehavenon with its highest award in 1990.

She was the wife of pianist William Kapell, who died in 1953. The couple had two children. She later married Gaston T. de Havenon.

She undertook a career as an expert on homelessness in New York in part as a result, she said, of her own experience of suddenly becoming a single mother with no income when her first husband (Kapell) died. She helped to publish Kapell's diaries and issue new recordings of his music after his death.