Basia Mosinski is a licensed, board certified creative arts psychotherapist. As she explains it, "Art Psychotherapy is a therapeutic process which employs the creative arts, such as active imagination, painting, drawing, photo, video and/or sound, to help her clients access their 'inner world' in addition to listening to their verbal processing." In her practice she serves the needs of clients who suffer from symptoms of grief, loss and trauma such as depression, anxiety, and PTSD. She also provides similar mental health services at GMHC Gay Men's Health Crisis where she works with people who also live with the HIV/AIDS virus.

Basia has followed a circuitous path to this production. She worked as a graphic (package and print) designer while pursing an undergraduate degree in the fine arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In her last two years of school she found the performance art department and credits it for changing her life. Performance Art was the most radical thing she had encountered in art school. She stopped painting during that time and used herself, and all her resources to communicate through the forms of writing, movement, sound and texture instead of canvas and other seemingly limited framing devices. She recalled that, "One of the first exercises in performance class was for 10 of the 15 or so students to cross the large performance space, one after the other, on the floor, without walking. The other 5 students were strewn on the floor in various poses which required the 10 students to find a way to traverse their bodies." Basia goes on to say that, "It was difficult enough for me to get down on the floor and risk doing something that wasn't very comfortable in front of a group of strangers but to slither across the room on my belly, pulling myself across the bodies of other students, pushed my perception and understanding of boundaries, possibilities and improvisation. Experimenting in performance art was both expanding and exhilarating."

After graduation in 1987, Basia continued as a studio artist, exhibiting her work throughout the country. By 1995, Basia completed her masters of fine arts degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago where she graduated with a focus in video art. After graduation she produced THEXPATCAFE Television Show, a screening venue for short, independent, videos produced by international artists, which aired for 4 seasons on CAN-TV in Chicago and MNN in Manhattan in the late 90's. She concurrently taught in the Film/Video/New Media Department at SAIC until 2005. Her personal video work explored human nature, mental illness and complicated life stories. She produced a series of short videos about her grown nephew Michael who lives with schizophrenia. The series was called Michael's Apartment. In 2005, she graduated with a second masters degree in art therapy from the SAIC. She moved to New York upon graduation in order to become a licensed therapist and to pursue her involvement in the arts.

Early in 2008, she met playwright Ron Scott Stevens and he soon learned of the scope of Basia's artistic talents and background. It wasn't long before he asked her to join him in producing The Cutting Den.

Basia Mosinski can be reached at: basia.artpsychotherapy@gmail.com