Art Works Podcast

To mark Disability Pride month , we’re revisiting one of my favorite interviews: a 2020 conversation with Rebekah Taussig who discusses her memoir in essays (and current NEA Big Read title) Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body . Rebekah, who has a Ph. D in Disability Studies and Creative Nonfiction, shares personal experiences that inform her book and shed light on the...

  Gil Rose is a conductor and  the founder and artistic director of the performing and recording ensemble the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP ), which is dedicated exclusively to commissioning, performing, and recording music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and Odyssey Opera which is dedicated to performing lesser-known older operas as well as contemporary new works. Rose is als...

  We’re celebrating July 4 by revisiting our 2015 podcast with former Singing Sergeant and current Director of Music and Opera at the National Endowment for the Arts Ann Meier Baker. In this podcast, Meier Baker talks about the professional bands and ensembles associated with each branch of the military and her decision to audition for and then join the Singing Sergeants—which meant going through...

023 NEA  Jazz Master   Kenny Garrett  is a saxophonist, composer, and bandleader. He sees himself as a “preacher” on his saxophone—searching for that “one note that would touch people.” In this music-filled podcast, Garrett talks about his musical beginnings in Detroit, move to NYC, and time with the Duke Ellington Band,  Art Blakey  and the Jazz Messengers, and  Miles Davis , and the different le...

Tiya Miles is best known as a historian and the author of the National Book Award winner All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, A Black Family Keepsake. But Tiya had preceded All That She Carried with a novel The Cherokee Rose , published in 2015, which she has revised and has just been reissued with a new introduction.  The novel moves from contemporary Georgia to the early 1800s and...

Today, we’re celebrating Pride month by revisiting my 2021 conversation with poet, 2011 NEA Literature Fellow, and 2020 Pulitzer Prize-winner  Jericho Brown . In this poetry-filled podcast, Brown walks us through his writing of his prize-winning collection The Tradition  in particular and poetry in general.  He reads a number of poems and discusses his creative process, his exploration of the them...

  Nicole Chung has written two memoirs in five years—both about loss and family.  The first is the highly acclaimed All You Can Ever Know which was a finalist for National Book Critics Circle Award . It explores the circumstances of her adoption as a Korean American by a white family who were advised take a colorblind approach to parenting, the implications of that decision for Chung, her successf...

Today we’re closing our celebration of Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month by re-visiting our 2017 conversation with the acclaimed Washington DC-based dancer and choreographer Dana Tai Soon Burgess.  Burgess and I spoke as his dance company was marking its 25th anniversary; so, the podcast is a retrospective of his philosophy and vision as a pioneering Asian Americ...

This is a two-part podcast: we begin with Christine Bial, the Director of Arts and Humanities Grants at Mid-America Arts Alliance which is a partner with National Endowment for the Arts in the Creative Forces Community Engagement Grant Program . She gives an overview of the program, its goals, scope, and examples of some of the programming. She also shares what was learned in the program’s first y...

Jason Rhee is an emerging documentary filmmaker who is editing his first film:  EJ Lee: All-American  .  Eun Jung Lee, known as EJ, was a college basketball star in the 1980s, nicknamed "the Korean Magic Johnson of NCAA women's basketball."  She went on to work at her alma mater, University of Louisiana Monroe (ULM) as an assistant coach and recruiter for over twenty years. In 2022, at the age of...

In light of Amy Tan’s recent National Humanities Medal, Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, and Mother’s Day fast approaching, it seems like a fitting time to re-air my 2010 conversation with the author. In this podcast, Amy Tan explores her life and work, particularly her novel and early NEA Big Read selection  "The Joy Luck Club." Tan discusses her upbringing, h...

In this episode, we speak with Meg Medina, a Newbery award-winning author  and the current Library of Congress National Ambassador for Young People's Literature. Meg has written numerous books for kids and young adults, including "Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass," “Burn, Baby, Burn” and the Merci Suárez triology which she just concluded.  In this interview, Meg talks about growing up in the m...

We’re celebrating the life and music of pianist, composer and 1994 NEA Jazz Master Ahmad Jamal who passed away on April 16, 2023. In this 2012 interview,  he discusses his legendary career as a pianist, composer, and innovator in jazz which he always called American classical music.  Our conversation covers Jamal's early influences including his great hometown of Pittsburgh, his unique approach to...

Today’s podcast goes behind the scenes with two members of Arena Stage’s creative team: dramaturg and literary manager Otis Cortez Ramsey-Zöe and casting director Joseph Pinzon. Both share their insights and experiences working on the current revival of  Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches.” We’ll learn about the work of a dramaturg and a...

This is the second of a two-part podcast with jazz artist Regina Carter . In part one , we traced Regina’s musical evolution, her upbringing in Detroit and the influence of that city on her musical development, and her transition from European classical music to jazz, and her move to NYC where she played with a variety of artists from Dolly Parton to Max Roach. We pick up today’s podcast where we...

In the first part of this two-part podcast with Regina Carter , she discusses her upbringing and musical education in Detroit. Trained in European classical music, she was exposed to wide variety of music and while in high school, she discovered jazz violin and it was life-changing. She talks about the appeal of jazz, her two years in the New England Conservatory of Music , her return to Michigan...

In this podcast,  we meet Tsione Wolde-Michael, the new executive director of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities (PCAH.) Wolde-Michael talks about her background growing up in the twin cities as a 1st generation child born to Ethiopian immigrants, her pull towards history and her desire to work in public history where she was able to do transformative work that would reach a...

Author Bushra Rehman discusses her novel, Roses in the Mouth of a Lion which is loosely based on her own girlhood growing up in a tightly-knit Pakistani American community in Corona, Queens and slowly opening up to her own queer identity. Bushra talks about her own upbringing and her desire to celebrate that community and show its many facets, her discovery of the larger world and the found family...

We’re kicking off Women’s History Month by looking at some of the artistic and cultural programming President/CEO and Artistic Director Janis Burley Wilson has brought to the August Wilson African American Cultural Center and the city of Pittsburgh over the years.  In this podcast, Janis Burley Wilson discusses the philosophy (engaging artists across disciplines to tell stories of African-American...

In this podcast, Louis Hayes talks about his long and illustrious career as one of the great hard bop drummers. We talk about his growing up in Detroit—home to many great musicians—in a household filled with music. Hayes started drumming when he was young— influenced by the two drummers in his family: his father and his cousin Clarence Stamps, who was his first teacher.  As a youngster, Hayes hear...

Chair Maria Rosario Jackson looks back at her first year leading the Arts Endowment and shares her ideas, plans, and initiatives for the year ahead. She discusses the philosophy that guides her vision for the NEA: "artful lives" and "arts In all" and reflects upon her travel throughout the country meeting with artists and arts administrators as well as local and civic leaders.  The chair also note...

Kyle Abraham  is an acclaimed choreographer and company director who is the recipient of many awards including a  Doris Duke Performing Artist Award  and a  MacArthur Fellowship .  In this podcast, he talks about growing up in Pittsburgh in a home that encouraged music and art, his life-changing experience when he first saw professional dance at the age of 15, his brief career as a professional da...

Author and MIT physicist Dr Alan Lightman is the co-writer and host of the new PBS series “Searching: Our Quest for Meaning in the Age of Science.”   In this podcast, Dr. Lightman discusses the experience that led to him to write the book Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine , why he agreed to develop the book into a series, his explorations with scientists, philosophers, and religious leader...

In this 2015 podcast, quilter, curator, and National Heritage Fellow    Dr. Carolyn Mazloom i takes us through her own history with quilts and quilting. She discusses her first career as an aerospace engineer and then her discovery of quilts, especially African-American narrative quilts. She talks about her own process for quilt-making, her work as a curator-- including the exhibit  of narrative q...

Kevin Wilson , the author of the  NEA Big Read  title  Nothing to See Here, explains his long-time obsession with spontaneous human combustion—a condition that figures prominently in the novel. In a nutshell, 28-year-old Lillian is tasked with minding the stepchildren of a wealthy old school friend whose politician husband has two kids who literally burst into flames when they get angry or agitate...