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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Long before the new movie "Wicked" made a sympathetic character of the Wicked Witch of the West, she was played by actress Margaret Hamilton in the classic film, The Wizard of Oz. But it was not easy being green. (This story first aired on All Things Considered on November 28, 2024.)
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Long before the new movie Wicked made a sympathetic character of the Wicked Witch of the West, she was played by actress Margaret Hamilton in the classic film, The Wizard of Oz.
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Dubai chocolate bars are kind of like KitKats, but stuffed with pistachio nuts and aromatic pistachio nougat. Foodies used to have to order the confections from Dubai — now they are everywhere. -
Steel pedal guitarist Paul Franklin set a CMA record as a 32-time nominee for Musician of the Year. Will this year be different? -
People come together every Tuesday on the University of Michigan campus to work on a tapestry based on traditional Palestinian embroidery. Each stitch represents a death in Gaza.
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Filmmaker Paul Morrissey, best known for his avant-garde collaborations with Andy Warhol, died this week in New York at age 86. The pair made low-budget, provocative films in the 1960s and '70s.
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On social media, young women are increasingly open about attending 12-step sex and love addiction programs. Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous reports 1,200 meetings in more than 50 countries. -
Fifty years ago women couldn't apply for a loan or a credit card without their husband or a male relative to co-sign. NPR looks at the law that changed women's financial power -- five decades later.
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Marianna Kiyanovska lives in Ukraine, but she’s reading her poetry at more than a dozen U.S. universities in October. Her latest poetry collection is called The Voices of Babyn Yar.
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Marianna Kiyanovska, one of Ukraine's leading poets, has been speaking about writing in wartime. Her latest collection, "The Voices of Babyn Yar," is about victims of the Holocaust.
