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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Mama's boy has been viewed as an emasculating insult. But numerous men are now publicly embracing their identities as proud mama's boys. (Story first aired on Weekend Edition Sunday on May 7, 2022.)
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The 2022 Pulitzer Prizes in fiction, poetry, drama and other categories in arts and letters were announced in New York along with awards for journalism. -
Southern California's donut shops are largely run by Cambodian and Vietnamese immigrants. An artist's exhibition celebrates them through the portraits she screen prints on pink donut boxes.
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In his new book Pizza Quest, Peter Reinhart describes his spiritual obsession with what he calls "the ultimate comfort food."
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Artificial intelligence and virtual reality are among the cutting-edge tools employed by the USC Shoah Foundation and Illinois Holocaust Museum
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Artist Phung Huynh incorporates pink donut boxes into her portraits of young Cambodian-Americans who grew up in their family donut stores in Southern California.
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The 2022 Pritzker Architecture Prize honors Diébédo Francis Kéré, who comes from a village with no school in Burkina Faso. He has designed primary schools for "many children to be happy and learn."
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Imagine Robert Redford or Ernest Borgnine as the Godfather. On the 50th anniversary of the film, the author of Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli describes the movie that could've been.
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Wired headphones are among the artifacts from the past decade making recent "nostalgic" comebacks. Fashion once moved in 20 year cycles but the nostalgia loop is getting smaller and faster,
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A lot has been said about the joy of cooking, but what about the fury? A host of new cookbooks right now aim to help cooks pound, grate and shred their feelings about the state of the world.
