Julia is passionate about making Expressive Arts Therapy accessible for hospice patients, people who live in long-term care facilities and people with disabilities. When not seeing clients at her office in Mission, Kansas, Julia contracts with Kansas City Hospice & Palliative Care to facilitate an Expressive Arts group process she developed called Movies Reimagined. Vering improvises versions of classical movies and musicals with residents living in nursing facilities, and has facilitated over 300 groups since 2022.
In 2024, Julia Vering received an Andy Warhol Foundation and Spencer Museum of Art-funded Rocket Grant from the Charlotte Street Foundation to create Adaptive Reimaginings, a companion documentary and book about her performance work with older adults, people with dementia and residents of long-term care facilities.
The book, Adaptive Reimaginings is a visual memoir and workbook about Vering’s 20+ years creating opportunities for fun, agency and inclusion in long-term care settings. The book illustrates Vering’s origin story, details her experiments integrating video, drama, and other arts with older adults and contains a how-to guide for caregivers and group facilitators.
The documentary, Movies Reimagined will highlight Julia Vering’s Movies Reimagined process and the impact it has on participants. The documentary aims to capture Vering’s novel way of engaging a diverse population of long-term care residents and facilities through humor, imagination, and multi-sensory elements. The film documents both the capacity of residents to fully engage through embodied, adaptive, theatrical and musical ways, and the resulting community building, joy and expansion of roles and identities the process fosters.
COMING SOON…