International Health Humanities Network Membership

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 founded and directs the award-winning TimeSlips Creative Storytelling, which replaces the pressure to remember with the freedom of imagination for people with memory loss. TimeSlips’ interactive website (timeslips.org), features a prompt library of over 100 images and questions, and bringing 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.  Basting was Founding Director of UWM's Center on Age and Community from 2003 to 2013, where she fostered partnerships between scholars, students, and service providers, and translated applied research into innovative educational tools including manuals, films, and social media.  In 2013, Basting returned to the Department of Theatre to focus on integrating her research and creative practice into teaching. Her teaching focus includes Performing Community, Playwriting, Storytelling, Play Analysis, and Creative Engagement in Health Settings.  She is working toward a moment when the arts are an integral element in our care systems.

     Currently, Basting is co-editing the book Playing Penelope, due out from University of Iowa Press in 2016, and co-writing and directing Slightly Bigger Women, a play inspired by the question - what has changed since Little Women's Jo March dared to dream of becoming a writer?  And what still needs to change?  She continues to facilitate and grow The Creative Trust Milwaukee, an alliance to foster life-long learning through the arts.  She lives in Milwaukee with husband Brad Lichtenstein and their two rambunctious boys Ben and Will.