TEDMED Talk:
How to meaningfully reconnect with those who have dementia

NYTimes “First Person” podcast Interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro

MacArthur Fellowship Video

As a writer and artist, my work is to invite people of all ages and abilities into the creative process. I work in the medium of relationships and systems change - ensuring that meaning-making and creative play is infused into all social and health care systems.

Essentially, my work is to ensure that no one, including myself, ever has to stop expressing and growing until life closes. While we live, we are storying creatures.

Nearly all my plays and art projects are collaboratively created with communities of non-artists. I have trained / consulted / created art with people in home care, senior centers, meal delivery programs, memory cafes, skilled nursing, assisted living - just regular folks - and all artists at heart.

Bio

Anne Basting is a writer, artist and advocate for the power of creativity to change lives. She is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee and Founder of the award-winning non-profit TimeSlips.org, which trains, inspires, and supports caregivers to infuse creativity into care. Her writing and large-scale public performances have helped shape an international movement to extend creative and meaningful expression from childhood, where it is expected, through to late life, where it has been too long withheld.

Basting is author of numerous articles and four books, Creative Care: A Revolutionary Approach to Dementia and Elder Care (Harper One, 2020),  The Penelope Project: An Arts-based Odyssey to Change Elder-care (University of Iowa Press, 2016) co-edited with Maureen Towey and Ellie Rose; Forget Memory: Creating better lives for people with dementia (2009) and The Stages of Age: Performing Age in Contemporary American Culture. Named a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, Basting is also the recipient of an Ashoka Fellowship, Rockefeller Fellowship, a Brookdale National Fellowship for leadership in Geriatrics and Gerontology, The Randy Martin Spirit Award, and numerous major grants across the arts and social services.

As both a scholar and artist, Basting has written or produced a dozen plays and public performances, including the collaborative projects Wendy’s Neverland (a reimagining of Peter Pan with 12 rural KY nursing homes in 2019), Slightly Bigger Women (an intergenerational reimagining of Little Women in 2015), The Islands of Milwaukee (a 2014 collaboration with Sojourn Theater and aging services orgs to reach elders living alone) and Finding Penelope (2011, with Sojourn Theater), a play inspired by a year of intergenerational conversations about the myth of Penelope from Homer’s Odyssey, and professionally staged in a long-term-care community.

Basting holds a Ph.D. in Theatre Arts from the University of Minnesota, and a Masters in Theatre from the University of Wisconsin. She advises the burgeoning field of arts and health, sits on multiple corporate advisory boards, and mentors several Fellows of the UCSF and Trinity College Global Brain Health Institute. Basting gives keynote addresses across the world on the power and potential of meaning-making practices to transform the experience of aging (and living).

At UWM, Basting directs the internationally renowned Center for 21st Century Studies and teaches and coordinates the Story Experience Fellow program, a year-long experiential learning program in which students are embedded in health and social care settings and build community through a range of story facilitation techniques.

Basting lives in Milwaukee with her husband filmmaker Brad Lichtenstein, their sons Ben and Will, and goofball dog Archie. She is at work on multiple projects including dramatically expanding Memory Cafes in the U.S. through social prescribing; a new participatory play format to tour Memory Cafes; a new book about the yearning for social connection; a performance project to create a ritual to recognize the passage into becoming a care partner for an adult or elder. Never a dull moment.

Short Bio

Anne Basting is a writer, artist and advocate for the power of creativity to transform our lives. She is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee and Founder of the award-winning non-profit TimeSlips.org, which trains, inspires, and supports caregivers to infuse creativity into care. Her writing and large-scale public performances have helped shape an international movement to extend creative and meaningful expression from childhood, where it is expected, through to late life, where it has been too long withheld.

Her books include Creative Care: A Revolutionary Approach to Elder and Dementia Care (Harper), Penelope: An Arts-based Odyssey to Transform Eldercare (U of Iowa), and Forget Memory: Creating Better Lives for People with Dementia (Johns Hopkins). Internationally recognized for her speaking and her innovative work, Anne is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, and numerous major awards and grants. She believes that creative engagement can and should be infused into every aging care system and has trained/consulted with Meals on Wheels, libraries, home care companies, senior centers, memory cafes, museums, adult day programs, and every level of long-term care.

In 2019, Anne collaborated with a team of artists, elders, and caregivers on her largest project yet – a reimagining of the story of Peter Pan with 12 rural Kentucky nursing homes. She is at work on multiple projects and is obsessed with growing the memory cafe infrastructure across the United States with social prescribing.

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