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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It's not a normal Thanksgiving and holiday planning has gotten more complicated for many families and friends figuring out safe, socially distant ways to share favorite foods and treasured recipes. -
Who'd have guessed that a centuries-old game would become 2020's hard-to-find, must-have toy? Sales spiked after the release of the hit Netflix show, and now toy analysts are warning of a shortage. -
"I've been an artist since I was a child," says James "Yaya" Hough. After serving 27 years in prison, he is now the first-ever artist in residence at the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office. -
The 2020 prize was awarded to Gluck for what the Swedish Academy said was "her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal."
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Nigerian American artist Ekene Ijeoma is an MIT professor who draws on sound and data to explore representations of social justice. He's working on a "voice portrait" of the census called A Counting. -
In a survey of more than 750 museum directors, 33% of them said there was either a "significant risk" of closing permanently by next fall or that they didn't know if their institutions would survive. -
Rivera was best known for her role as Santana Lopez, a take-no-prisoners cheerleader/singer on Glee for six seasons. She had disappeared while boating with her son on Lake Piru in Southern California. -
Kramer was a writer with an Oscar-nominated screenplay when his friends started dying mysteriously — galvanizing him to found the Gay Men's Health Crisis, and later ACT UP, to combat AIDS. -
When the Roosevelt administration rolled out millions of dollars to fund artists, musicians, writers and actors, it wasn't just about job creation. It was to unite a nation in turmoil. -
A leading U.S. arts organization released a survey of more than 10,000 artists and creative workers on Friday. It found 95% of them have experienced income loss as a result of COVID-19.
