Anne Basting

Anne Basting (Ph.D.) is Professor of Theatre at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. Her work focuses on the potential for the arts and humanities to improve our quality of life as communities and individuals. For over 20 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 three books, Forget Memory: Creating better lives for people with dementia (2009) and The Stages of Age: Performing Age in Contemporary American Culture.

Named a 2016 MacArthur Fellow, Basting is also the recipient of a Rockefeller Fellowship, a Brookdale National Fellowship, and numerous major grants, including the MAP Fund and NEA Artworks. She is author and/or producer of nearly a dozen plays and public performances, including Slightly Bigger Women (2015) and Finding Penelope (2011), a play inspired by a year of intergenerational conversations about the myth of Penelope from Homer’s Odyssey, and professionally staged at a long term care facility. Her latest book —The Penelope Project: An Arts-based Odyssey to Change Elder-care (University of Iowa Press, 2016) co-edited with Maureen Towey and Ellie Rose — tells the story of that remarkable collaboration.