Anne Basting

Anne Basting (she/her) is a writer, artist, and advocate for the power of creativity to transform our lives. She is Professor of English at University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, where she directs the Center for 21st Century Studies (C21), an interdisciplinary humanities center working to build a community of scholars to address the pressing issues of our time.

Her creative activism entails studying systems and infusing them with creativity to empower the storytellers within. She has trained, consulted, and collaborated with Meals on Wheels, libraries, museums, home care companies, senior centers, memory cafes, elder advocacy organizations, nursing homes, high schools, arts councils, children’s choirs, theater companies, and bike and pedestrian advocacy organizations.

Basting is Founder of the award-winning non-profit TimeSlips.org, which trains, inspires, and supports caregivers to infuse creativity into care relationships and systems. 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 late life, where it has been too long withheld.

Her writing includes 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.

Basting’s Unstoppable Voters project is part of C21’s annual programming, focused in 2023-24 on the theme Trust the Vote. In addition to this project, Basting is currently working on expanding Memory Cafes in the U.S.; a performance project to establish a ritual supporting new caregivers called “Care Showers;” a visual art project called Wonder Walks, and a performance project called Within a Single Rose.