Janine Tursini  |  Director & CEO

[email protected]
Phone: (301) 255-0103

Janine Tursini (she/her) is Arts for the Aging Director & CEO. She is the leading force behind the organization’s pioneering directions and its national recognition for best practices, program design, and outcomes: Under her tenure Arts for the Aging has been named a Model Program in Lifelong Learning by the National Endowment for the Arts, a Trailblazer by the Maryland Department of Aging and One of the Best D.C. Area Small Charities by Spur Local. Arts for the Aging has been featured in The New York TimesThe Washington Post, on CNN News, and in the award-winning national PBS documentary film Do Not Go Gently. In previous positions, Janine was director of student services in the Corcoran School of Art, and a program registrar helping launch the public programs department at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Janine serves on Maryland’s Age-Friendly Montgomery Advisory Group and Smithsonian Institution Dementia Programming Advisory Committee. She consults nationally on best practices in the growing field of creative aging. She has served on advisory boards for the GWU Center on Aging, Health, and Humanities, and the National Center for Creative Aging, and she is a member of Leadership Greater Washington class of 2018. Her article, A Person Who Is Becoming, is published in the Creativity & Human Development International e-Journal, and she has contributed to seminal industry resource guides including Creativity Matters: The Arts and Aging Toolkit and Bringing the Arts to Life: A Guide to the Arts and Long-Term Care. She received her bachelor of fine arts from Dickinson College. Janine’s passion for arts and culture was nurtured by a closeknit Italian American family of growers, makers, and creatives who encouraged cooking and Sunday suppers, sewing and drawing, and tap, jazz, and ballet classes. Her care for being of service to others was sparked by remembrances of Sister Wilhelmina humming down the elementary school halls shaking a carton to collect “money for the missions.” Her motivation to work with Arts for the Aging arose from the path it creates for professional artists to earn a living beyond the commercial route of exhibiting, performing, or selling original works—a practical and imaginative application for uplifting public health. She loves singing in community chorus, getting lost in films, museum-going, and leftover eggplant parmesan.