Staff

Anne Basting, Coordinator of the Creative Trust; Professor, Theatre

Office:  1163 Enderis Hall
Phone:  414.229.2732
Email: basting@uwm.edu

Nolen Borne, Creative Trust Research Fellow, BFA Theatre/Acting

Samantha Goodrich, Creative Trust Research  Fellow, Musical Theatre

Elois Hulsbrink, Creative Trust Research Fellow; UWM Honors College, Global Communications

Anne Basting, Coordinator, The Creative Trust

Anne Basting (Ph.D.) is an educator, scholar, and artist whose work focuses on the potential for the arts and humanities to improve our quality of life as communities and individuals.  For over 15 years, Basting has developed and researched methods for embedding the arts into long term care, with a particular focus on people with cognitive disabilities like dementia.  Basting is author of numerous articles and two books, Forget Memory: Creating better lives for people with dementia (2009) and The Stages of Age: Performing Age in Contemporary American Culture. Basting is the recipient of a Rockefeller Fellowship, a Brookdale National Fellowship, and numerous major grants. She is author and/or producer of nearly a dozen plays and public performances, including Finding Penelope (2011), a play inspired by a year of intergenerational conversations about the myth of Penelope from Homer’s Odyssey, and professionally staged throughout Luther Manor, a long term care facility in Wisconsin.  

Basting holds a Ph.D. in Theatre Arts from the University of Minnesota, and a Masters in Theatre from the University of Wisconsin.  She continues to direct the award-winning TimeSlips Creative Storytelling Project, which she founded in 1998.  TimeSlips’ new ( free!) interactive website (timeslips.org), features a prompt library of over 100 images and questions, and brings creative engagement to elders and their families wherever they live.  Basting gives keynote addresses across the world on the power and potential of creative engagement.  As Founding Director of the Center on Age & Community (2003-2012), Basting fostered partnerships between scholars, students, and service providers, and translated applied research into innovative educational tools including manuals, films, and social media.  Basting teaches storytelling, and creative community engagement; and is curricular coordinator of UWM's summer institute CREATE/CHANGE: Transforming care for elders through creative engagement.

Basting is currently partner with Sojourn Theatre, Interfaith Older Adult Program, Milwaukee County Dept. on Aging's Home Delivered Meal Service, and Stowell & Associates on the Islands of Milwaukee, an effort to bring creative engagement to older adults living alone - and to having their input catalyze a community-wide conversation on how to envision a more connected future. 

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