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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Every year, musicians across the country gather for what has become known as TubaChristmas Concerts range from just a few tubas to hundreds of them — the record is 835, set by Kansas City in 2018. -
Vijay Gupta was a 19-year-old violin prodigy when he joined the LA Philharmonic. Now he runs Street Symphony, an organization bringing music to clinics, jails and homeless shelters on Skid Row. -
The conductor has announced his diagnosis with an aggressive form of brain cancer and plans to step down as the group's artistic director. -
Teachout, a Missouri native and former critic with the Kansas City Star, has died at the age of 65. He wrote acclaimed biographies of such arts figures as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and George Balanchine. -
Pixar's animated fantasy takes viewers inside the mind of an 11-year-old girl named Riley. Psychologists say the film offers an accurate picture of how emotions and memories help make us who we are. -
Today's cartoonists are depicting the novel coronavirus as an angry, spiky ball — reflecting our knowledge of viruses. But before we knew what they looked like, we imagined disease differently. -
Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara founded Grafton Architects in Dublin in 1978. The Pritzker Architecture Prize jury called the two Irish architects "beacons" in a male-dominated field. -
Attendance at Philadelphia's Penn Museum has shot up since the Global Guides first tours in 2018. The refugee and immigrant docents receive training in archaeology, ancient history and story-telling. -
The very earliest movies were all long takes, but the immersive minimalism of one-shot films carry extra appeal in an era of congested platforms and CGI overload. -
Contestants on the new social-media-based reality show, The Circle, never meet in person. Their online profiles may not be what they seem — reminding us of a certain kind of literary drama.
