The Kitchen Sisters Present

Producer Zoe Kurland's father, costume designer Jeffrey Kurland, talks about designing the iconic push up bra for actress Julia Roberts for the film Erin Brockovich. Zoe follows the story interviewing the real Erin Brockovich and examining her own relationship to body image, confidence and identity. This story was written and produced by Zoe Kurland for Signal Hill, and edited by Liza Yeager and Jackson Roach. Sound design and additional production by Liza Yeager. Additional editorial support from Omar Etman, Annie Rosenthal, and the Issue Two cohort. Signal Hill is an independent, listener-funded, nonprofit publication.Zoe is a writer and audio documentarian based in Texas. She has produced three award-winning podcasts, most recently reporting, producing and hosting A Whole Other Country (named one of the 20 best podcasts of 2025 by The Atlantic and featured in the 2026 Tribeca Film Festival). She started her career in audio working for The Kitchen Sisters, and later joined LAist as a producer. Her work has appeared in outlets such as New York Magazine, Signal Hill, Articles of Interest, and on APM’s Marketplace. She holds a national Edward R. Murrow Award for innovation in audio, twelve regional Edward R. Murrow Awards, and three Signal Awards.The Kitchen Sisters Present is produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Nikki Silva & Davia Nelson) with Nathan Dalton and Brandi Howell. We're part of Radiotopia from PRX, a curated network of independent producers.Find out more at kitchensisters.org, radiotopia.fm, signalhill.fm 

A collage of voices, music, archival recordings, and everyday sounds recalls the World Trade Center’s history and the people who filled it with life. Stories range from Radio Row and immigrant workers to weddings above Manhattan, Philippe Petit’s high-wire walk, and the towers’ hidden motion. Personal messages and reflections trace loss, grief, memory, and the many ways communities carry tragedy forward.

Tom Luddy was a quiet titan of cinema. He presided over the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley for some 10 years, co-founded and directed the Telluride Film Festival for nearly 50 years, produced some 14 movies, match-made dozens of international love affairs, and foraged for the most beautiful, political, important, risky films and made sure there was a place for them to be seen in the world. And he made sure that the people making this powerful work were known and knew each other. Tom Luddy with his photographic memory, his infinite rolodex, his encyclopedic knowledge of global cinema and his catalytic ability to connect people, caused the most unusual of collaborations to come to be. Tom championed the French New Wave, the Czech New Wave, Brazilian cinema novo, dissident Soviet cinema, directors Francis Coppola, Jean-Luc Godard, Werner Herzog, Agnes Varda, Les Blank, Paul Schrader, Agnieszka Holland, Barry Jenkins, Laurie Anderson and countless others.Tom passed away on February 13, 2023. There’s a giant hole in the screen without him here. But his DNA is in the hundreds of filmmakers, musicians, writers and activists he nurtured and inspired. As film enthusiasts gather this weekend at the Telluride Film Festival, The Kitchen Sisters Present... The Tom Luddy Connection: The Man, The Movies, The Rolodex. Produced by Evan Jacoby and The Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson & Nikki Silva) in collaboration with Brandi Howell and Nathan Dalton. Mixed by Jim McKee.

The Hip Hop Archive at Harvard, the Pack Horse Librarians of Eastern Kentucky, the Lenny Bruce Archive, the Internet Archive and more surprising stories of preservation and civic life. With host, Academy Award-winning actress, Frances McDormand. The Kitchen Sisters Present Archiving the Underground, hour one of our two-part Keepers special. Stories of activist archivists, rogue librarians, curators, collectors and historians. Guardians of history, large and small. Protectors of the free flow of information and ideas. Keepers of the culture and the culture and collections they keep.Interviews featured include: Dr. Marcyliena Morgan, founder of the Hip Hop Archive. 9th Wonder (aka Patrick Douthit), acclaimed hip-hop producer, DJ, and Nasir Jones Hip Hop Fellow who discusses setting the standards for the hip-hop canon. Henry Louis Gates Jr., the renowned Harvard professor and literary critic. Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive. Kitty Bruce, daughter of comedian Lenny Bruce, who details the creation and preservation of the Lenny Bruce Archive. And many more.Produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson & Nikki Silva) with Nathan Dalton and Brandi Howell. Mixed by Jim McKee.

Narrated by Andy Garcia. At the turn of the century until the 1930s in the cigar factories of Tampa and Ybor City, a well dressed man in a panama hat with a loud and beautiful voice sat atop a platform and read to the cigar workers as they rolled. These readers, known as Lectores de Tabaqueres, read Cervantes, Zola, Victor Hugo, Karl Marx, Jules Verne…. It was the voices and words of these lectores, before radio and mechanization, who informed, organized, and incited the cigar workers, who labored by hand until the 1930s, when both the rollers and readers were replaced by mechanization. A lost tradition of story and smoke.From the Lost & Found Sound series on NPR. Produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson & Nikki Silva) and Jay Allison. The Kitchen Sisters Present is part of Radiotopia from PRX.

As part of our Quilts as Monuments series we revisit the story of Gert McMullin and the AIDS Memorial Quilt, the gay rights movement in San Francisco, Harvey Milk, The White Night Riots and more.In 1985, Gert McMullin was one of the first San Franciscans to put a stitch on the AIDS Quilt, the quilt that began with one memorial square in honor of a man who had died of AIDS, and that now holds some 110,000 names. The quilt is made up of some 50,000 panels, each 3x6 feet, the size of a grave. It weighs 60 tons. End to end, it would stretch out more than 50 miles.Gert never planned it this way, but over the decades she has become the keeper of the quilt and has stewarded it, repaired it, tended it, traveled with it and conserved it for some 33 years now.In 2020, when COVID-19 hit, Gert was one of the first Bay Area citizens to begin sewing masks—PPE for nurses and health care workers who were lacking proper protection—masks she made from fabric left over from the AIDS Quilt. The comfort, outrage and honoring of an earlier pandemic being used to protect people from a new one.In January of 2020, the AIDS Memorial Quilt, now part of the National AIDS Memorial, returned home to the Bay Area after 16 years in Atlanta. It took six 52-foot semis to get it there. The extensive AIDS archive, which Gert gathered, collected and protected since its earliest days, is now part of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.This episode features interviews with LGBT rights activist Cleve Jones who worked with Harvey Milk and conceived of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, and John Cunningham, executive director of the National AIDS Memorial.Produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Nikki Silva & Davia Nelson) with Nathan Dalton and Brandi Howell. Mixed by Jim McKee. The Kitchen Sisters Present is part of Radiotopia from PRX.

Olivia Wilde. Actor. Director. Producer. Olivia comes from a long line of journalists, a British father and an American mother, who have made groundbreaking investigative documentaries. The late writer Christopher Hitchens, a friend of the family, was her babysitter. She grew up in a world of words, a world of stories, a world of speaking truth to power. She chose her stage name in honor of Oscar Wilde, a writer she admires.Olivia starred in dozens of TV shows and movies before directing her first feature in 2019, the raunchy, high-stakes, hilarious, high school comedy, Booksmart.Her latest movie, The Invite, is a tight ensemble film, which she both directs and acts in alongside Penelope Cruz, Edward Norton and Seth Rogen.The Invite was a smash hit at the Sundance Film Festival in January — the last one in Park City, Utah — and set off one of those legendary bidding wars you hear about like Sex, Lies, and Videotape did back in the day.In April The Invite opened the San Francisco Film Festival at the newly renovated historic Castro Theatre and Olivia came to see us in the studios of KQED just before the screening to talk about the movie and her path as a filmmaker.

Yvonne Wells (narrative quiltmaker), Mercedes Braxton (healing hand-stitch artist), Charlie Lucas (recycled-material sculptor), Winnie McQueen (story quilter) and preservationist Carol Van Westen, Judge Susan Russ Walker, and Reverend Dale Braxton discuss creating memorial quilts that stitch together names and local history. They describe finding forgotten names, commissioning narrative quilts, community quilting bees, and taking the Sew Their Names exhibit on the road.

John Steinbeck called it “The Mother Road.” Songwriter Bobby Troup said it was where to go to get your kicks. Mickey Mantle swore, “If it hadn’t been for Highway 66 I never would have been a Yankee.”The Kitchen Sisters spent the summer of 1984 traveling every inch of this storied highway — “The Main Street of America” — as it was closing, recording just about everything that moved between Chicago and LA and made a series of epic radio documentaries to commemorate the legendary road and what it meant to the nation. If I remember right we paid about $1.20 a gallon as we motored east to west.In the summer of 1985 the road was officially removed from the United States Highway system and NPR’s All Things Considered aired our series of stories about the life and history of Route 66 filled with interviews with dozens and dozens of Americans whose lives intersected with The Mother Road, along with field recordings, archival audio, music and sound.As Route 66 turns 100 we dipped into our archive to share these poignant and lively time capsules for your next road trip and your summer listening pleasure.Our narrator is actor David Selby.

Faith Spotted Eagle, Ihanktonwan elder and activist who revived the Ishnati coming-of-age ceremony, appears with Madonna Thunderhawk, longtime activist and elder, and Teresa Hart, boarding-school survivor and seamstress. They discuss reviving Braveheart rituals, moon camp structure and teachings, sewing as healing, camp circle values, and links between removals and modern child welfare.