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Culture Club with Weatherspoon Art Museum Director Juliette Bianco

Juliette Bianco outside the WFDD studios
Neal Charnoff
/
WFDD
Juliette Bianco

For this edition of Culture Club, our segment devoted to recommendations from local personalities, WFDD's Neal Charnoff sat down with Juliette Bianco, director of the Weatherspoon Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Bianco is a fan of what she calls "speculative fiction," and praises two thematically related science fiction novels: Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel and I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman. She believes that both novels ask important questions about how we live our lives, and how we understand what's real and what isn't.

She also appreciates the authenticity of North of North, a Netflix comedy about a young woman reinventing herself in a tiny Arctic community.

And Bianco greatly admires American photographer Catherine Opie, whose work often focuses on marginalized communities. Opie's latest exhibition of portraits is called "To Be Seen."

Neal Charnoff joined 88.5 WFDD as Morning Edition host in 2014. Raised in the Catskill region of upstate New York, he graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1983. Armed with a liberal arts degree, Neal was fully equipped to be a waiter. So he prolonged his arrested development bouncing around New York and L.A. until discovering that people enjoyed listening to his voice on the radio. After a few years doing overnight shifts at a local rock station, Neal spent most of his career at Vermont Public Radio. He began as host of a nightly jazz program, where he was proud to interview many of his idols, including Dave Brubeck and Sonny Rollins. Neal graduated to the news department, where he was the local host for NPR's All Things Considered for 14 years. In addition to news interviews and features, he originated and produced the Weekly Conversation On The Arts, as well as VPR Backstage, which profiled theater productions around the state. He contributed several stories to NPR, including coverage of a devastating ice storm. Neal now sees the value of that liberal arts degree, and approaches life with the knowledge that all subjects and all art forms are connected to each other. Neal and his wife Judy are enjoying exploring North Carolina and points south. They would both be happy to never experience a Vermont winter again.

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