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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Everyone knows that red means danger, but how did purple become a cautionary color? At an EPA conference in the late 1990s, attendees nearly came to blows over color coding on the Air Quality Index.
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It was fun while it lasted. Once a cornerstone of its marketing strategy, Netflix is rolling back access to shared passwords.
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Kenneth Anger was a queer underground filmmaker whose bestselling book, Hollywood Babylon, purported to reveal the seamy side of a golden era. -
Officials in Escambia County, Fla., removed 10 books from school libraries and restricted access to more than 150 others. Writers' advocacy group PEN America calls the lawsuit the first of its kind. -
The largest book publisher in the country has joined free speech group PEN America, parents and authors to push back against book banning, filing a federal lawsuit in Florida's Escambia County.
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"It's very hard to narrow the list," says the Chief Preservation Officer of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The 2023 list includes a gas station, an artist studio and two Chinatowns. -
The Associated Press won two awards for its Ukraine coverage, including the prestigious Public Service award. The prize for fiction went to two books: Demon Copperhead and Trust. -
The Canadian singer-songwriter wrote classics like "If You Could Read My Mind," "Early Morning Rain" and "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald." -
Toni Morrison remains the sole Black female recipient of a Nobel Prize in Literature. Princeton University, where Morrison was a professor, is commemorating the 30th anniversary of her win. -
Quant made playful clothes for young modern women they could wear to work and "run to the bus in." Her London shop was an epicenter of youth culture that popularized hot pants and miniskirts.
