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 radio and online stories reflect political and economic realities, cultural issues, obsessions and transitions, as well as artistic adventurousness— and awesomeness.
Over the last few years, Ulaby has strengthened NPR's television coverage both in terms of programming and industry coverage and profiled breakout artists such as Ellen Page and Skylar Grey and behind-the-scenes tastemakers ranging from super producer Timbaland to James Schamus, CEO of Focus Features. Her stories have included a series on women record producers, an investigation into exhibitions of plastinated human bodies, and a look at the legacy of gay activist Harvey Milk. Her profiles have brought listeners into the worlds of such performers as Tyler Perry, Ryan Seacrest, Mark Ruffalo, and Courtney Love.
Ulaby has earned multiple fellowships at the Getty Arts Journalism Program at USC Annenberg as well as a fellowship at the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism to study youth culture. In addition, Ulaby's weekly podcast of NPR's best arts stories. Culturetopia, won a Gracie award from the Alliance for Women in Media Foundation.
Joining NPR in 2000, Ulaby was recruited through NPR's Next Generation Radio, and landed a temporary position on the cultural desk as an editorial assistant. She started reporting regularly, augmenting her work with arts coverage for D.C.'s Washington CityPaper.
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. Her film reviews and academic articles have been published across the country and internationally. For a time, she edited fiction for The Chicago Review and served on the editing staff of the leading academic journal Critical Inquiry. Ulaby taught classes in the humanities at the University of Chicago, Northeastern Illinois University and at high schools serving at-risk students.
A former doctoral student in English literature, Ulaby worked as an intern for the features desk of the Topeka Capital-Journal after graduating from Bryn Mawr College. She was born in Amman, Jordan, and grew up in the idyllic Midwestern college towns of Lawrence, Kansas and Ann Arbor, Michigan.
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It took until adulthood for Bonnie Morales, the daughter of immigrant Russian Jews, to appreciate the food of her childhood. Now she owns a popular Oregon restaurant and has released a new cookbook. -
A bird at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., had a beak that was so worn down that he could not catch bugs to eat. The skeleton of an ancestor and a 3-D printer came to the rescue.
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Stephen Colbert had a superPAC. Jon Stewart has it now. But they're totally not coordinating with each other — or so they explain when parodying campaign finance laws. -
The film academy's 54-member board of governors, including Oscar-winning actors Whoopi Goldberg and Tom Hanks, voted to strip the legendary producer of his membership.
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After the past two years, in which the Swedish academy honored a Russian journalist and American songwriter Bob Dylan, it marks a return to literary fiction by honoring Ishiguro.
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Law enforcement officers are using the trucks to prevent vehicle attacks like the one in Charlottesville that killed one woman and injured several other people. -
White supremacists using Crusaders' crosses and other medieval imagery on their homemade shields say the time period is an ideal of a white Europe. But medieval scholars say the white supremacists are wrong and the scholars are fighting back.
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Sam Shepard was both a prize-winning playwright and an an acclaimed actor. He won a Pulitzer for Drama for Buried Child in 1979 and wrote more than 40 other plays as well as short stories and essays. He died Thursday at his home in Kentucky of complications from Lou Gehrig's disease. He was 73.
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Celebrity chef Rosanna Pansino hosts the YouTube show Nerdy Nummies and has more than 8 million subscribers. Among her fans are thousands of children who want to learn how to bake. -
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.
