Outreach Credits
Anne Basting Ph.D., Outreach Director, is the Director of the Center on Age and Community and an Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the Peck School of the Arts, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Basting has written extensively on issues of aging and representation, including her book The Stages of Age: Performing Age in Contemporary American Culture. Her numerous articles and essays have been published across multiple disciplines including journals such as TDR (The Drama Review), American Theatre, and Journal of Aging Studies, and anthologies Figuring Age, Mental Wellness in Aging, the Handbook for the Humanities and Aging, and Aging and the Meaning of Time. Basting is the recipient of a Rockefeller Fellowship, a Brookdale National Fellowship, and numerous major grants for her scholarly and creative endeavors. Her creative work includes nearly a dozen plays and public performances, including The Frida Kahlo Retrospective (1994), Persuasion (co-written with Ping Chong, 1994), the Last Dinosaur (winner, Jane Chambers Student division, 1992), and Time Slips (Milwaukee, 2000, New York City 2001). Basting received her Ph.D. in Theatre Arts and Dance from the University of Minnesota in 1995. Basting continues to direct the TimeSlips Creative Storytelling Project, which she founded in 1998, and makes numerous presentations about creativity and aging across the United States.
Lynne Blinkenberg, Outreach Director, is the Director of Community Outreach for Wisconsin Public Television (WPT), managing the station’s statewide outreach activities, as well as WPT’s national outreach projects, including the Emmy-Award winning No Greater Love (2003 National Award for Community Service). Blinkenberg is currently directing outreach efforts for WPT’s The Forgetting: A Portrait of Alzheimer’s and serves as the Ready To Learn Coordinator, providing educational outreach for childcare professionals and parents. She serves on the National Educational Telecommunications Association (NETA) Outreach Advisory Council, the POV Outreach Advisory group and the PBS Ready To Learn Station Advisory Council. She has served as advisor for numerous outreach efforts and materials, including Frontline, POV, Sesame Street and Caillou. She has been honored as the Outreach MVP by NETA, as well as the 1997 Elmo Award and Ralph B. Rogers Awards from Sesameworkshop. She has worked at WPT for nearly 8 years; after a career in non-profit management and education (including Girl Scouts).
Lauren Burke is the Outreach Coordinator the Almost Home project. Originally from Massachusetts, Lauren came to Milwaukee four years ago from Florida to attend the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She graduated from UWM in May of 2004 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in film, and a Bachelor of Arts degree in broadcast journalism. In 2003 and early 2004, Lauren worked part-time at Milwaukee Public Radio (WUWM) as an on-air reporter. Her love of film led her to write movie reviews for The Leader, UWM’s campus newspaper. She was also an editor for the publication. She is the recipient of four Milwaukee Press Club Awards for print, television and radio. Lauren also won two Northwest Broadcast News Association awards, a Wisconsin Broadcasters Association Scholarship, and UWM journalism department scholarship. Lauren’s primary interest lies in documentary work. She is currently co-producing a four-part series for Milwaukee Public Television on the history of Milwaukee. Lauren is also a production assistant for the Almost Home documentary.
Maria Cuervo, Web Developer, has been a Web developer, programming and designing Web sites, at Wisconsin Public Television for the past five years. In both 2003 and 2004, Cuervo was honored with the Milwaukee Press Club Excellence in Wisconsin Journalism Award for Best Web Site Design for “Wisconsin Stories.” She is currently a full-time graduate student pursuing a degree in Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Sue Fey, Project Designer, is the manager of Video Design for Wisconsin Public Television. A WPT veteran of 24 years, she has been involved in all aspects of local, regional and national production design. She was the production designer for a decade-long series of collaborative projects WPT produced for PBS, including the Emmy Award-winning “The 30 Second Candidate.” She also has received numerous local and regional awards for her print and video design work. She is the production designer for the weekly WPT news series “Here and Now” as well as “The Wisconsin Gardener” and the national PBS “Sewing with Nancy” series. She is currently working on the award-winning series, “The Oneida Speak” and a national production exploring the role of Native Americans in the U.S. armed services titled “The Way of the Warrior.”
Erika Kachama-Nkoy, Web Developer, is a Web designer at Wisconsin Public Television where over the past five years she has developed and designed various Web sites for WPT. In 2003, she received an Alchemy Award of Excellence from the Public Relations Society of America, Madison-Chapter for her work on the “Wisconsin World War II Stories” Web site. She received a 2003 and a 2004 Milwaukee Press Club Excellence in Wisconsin Journalism Award for Best Web Site Design for “Wisconsin Stories.” She also was nominated in 2003 for a National Educational Telecommunications Association Award for the “wisconsinstories.org” Web site. She developed “A Century of Quilts” for PBS and in 2000, her online travelogue, “Fait Comme Moi,” received a Médaille d'Or.
Maria Ledger, Associate Outreach Director, is the Associate Director for the Center on Age and Community at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. She has worked for over 16 years in human services and for the past 10 years in the field of aging. Maria has done extensive community outreach and training in the areas of elder abuse and neglect. She has an undergraduate degree in psychology from Marquette University and received her Master’s degree in Rehabilitation Counseling from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale.
Deborah Rubenstein, Outreach Consultant, has spent the last eleven years ensuring that great television documentaries become events and instruments for change. She is nationally recognized for her expertise in the field of media impact, a skill she developed primarily through her eleven years of work as Executive Director of Special Projects for Bill Moyers’ Public Affairs Television, Inc., where she was responsible for creating and coordinating companion books and web sites, promotional campaigns, and school and community action efforts in conjunction with many of the company’s broadcasts. She worked on Emmy, Dupont and Peabody award-winning projects that ranged in subject from politics to literature to public life to religion. Some of the most recognized programs include: NOW with Bill Moyers, Our Own Terms: Moyers on Dying, Becoming American: The Chinese Experience. Healing and the Mind, Moyers on Addiction: Close to Home, Facing the Truth, The Language of Life and Free Speech for Sale. The impact campaigns Ms. Rubenstein created around many of these programs have become models for others working in the industry.
Anne Wilder, Associate Outreach Director is a Community Outreach Manager at Wisconsin Public Television (WPT). Anne joined WPT in 2000 after years of teaching Educational Theatre to grade-schoolers and even more years of working in the world of advertising and promotion. Her work at WPT includes managing statewide outreach for And Thou Shalt Honor in fall 2002 and the NCO funded SCOPE project of Coming Together: The Two Towns of Jasper in January 2003 which resulted in the Wisconsin Idea Award from University of Wisconsin-Extension, the University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor’s Award for Community Partnerships and an Outreach Award from the National Educational Telecommunication Association (NETA). Anne is currently completing a project with Wisconsin 4-H that includes a curriculum on race and diversity to be used as the basis for a system-wide, 5-year initiative on cultural competency.