Neda Ulaby
Neda Ulaby reports on arts, entertainment, and cultural trends for NPR's Arts Desk.
Scouring the various and often overlapping worlds of art, music, television, film, new media and literature, Ulaby's stories reflect political and economic realities, cultural issues, obsessions and transitions.
A twenty-year veteran of NPR, Ulaby started as a temporary production assistant on the cultural desk, opening mail, booking interviews and cutting tape with razor blades. Over the years, she's also worked as a producer and editor and won a Gracie award from the Alliance for Women in Media Foundation for hosting a podcast of NPR's best arts stories.
Ulaby also hosted the Emmy-award winning public television series Arab American Stories in 2012 and earned a 2019 Knight-Wallace Fellowship at the University of Michigan. She's also been chosen for fellowships at the Getty Arts Journalism Program at USC Annenberg and the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism.
Before coming to NPR, Ulaby worked as managing editor of Chicago's Windy City Times and co-hosted a local radio program, What's Coming Out at the Movies. A former doctoral student in English literature, Ulaby has contributed to academic journals and taught classes in the humanities at the University of Chicago, Northeastern Illinois University and at high schools serving at-risk students.
Ulaby worked as an intern for the features desk of the Topeka Capital-Journal after graduating from Bryn Mawr College. But her first appearance in print was when she was only four days old. She was pictured on the front page of the New York Times, as a refugee, when she and her parents were evacuated from Amman, Jordan, during the conflict known as Black September.
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Several main characters in the HBO series happen to have disabilities. "I had never seen my own experience in life reflected so accurately, so vividly, so viscerally," says one disability activist. -
Canada turns 150 on July 1 and a celebration is underway in Los Angeles comedy clubs, of all places, in honor of the long comedy tradition between the country to the north and LA.
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The song "Imagine" is an international anthem of peace and, well, imagination. Until this week, John Lennon had sole credit for writing the song, but in his lifetime, Lennon wanted that changed.
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A writers' strike was narrowly averted Tuesday, as a tentative three-year pact was reached between members of the Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. -
Filmmaker Jonathan Demme died this morning in his New York apartment, of complications from esophageal cancer. He was 73 years old. Demme had the seemingly effortless ability to cross over from big budget Hollywood movies like "Silence of the Lambs" and "Philadelphia" to documentaries about Haiti and rockumentaries about Talking Heads and Neil Young.
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"The World's Foremost Authority" has died at age 102. Professor Irwin Corey was a staple on late-night TV. In his 90s, he was panhandling for social causes in Manhattan.
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Many Chinese-Americans are celebrating the start of the Lunar New Year Saturday. We'll meet the 97-year-old who helped revolutionize Chinese food in America and find out how she's celebrating.
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Longtime toymakers are broadening their horizons — offering dolls and other figures with hearing aids, wheelchairs and insulin pumps in city scenes, not just hospitals. That's a start, activists say. -
A charity cookbook featuring soup recipes from Alice Waters, Anthony Bourdain and others, famous and not, has raised $300,000 so far for displaced Syrians. Why soup? It's a universal comfort food. -
The first Thanksgiving most likely took place in 1621 at Plymouth Colony, Mass. The living history museum there recently showcased the spiritual music of both the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians.
