The Kitchen Sisters Present
Episodes
Have a Seat, The Casting Director Will See You Shortly – The Legends of Juliet Taylor & Ellen Lewis
13 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
On Sunday the first Oscar for Achievement in Casting will be given in the 98-year history of the Academy Awards. Today, The Kitchen Sisters and host F...
Everyone's a Casting Director – The First-Ever Academy Award for Achievement in Casting with Host Frances McDormand
04 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Who discovered Diane Keaton and put her in Annie Hall? Who found Dustin Hoffman and made sure he played Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy? Who saw Jason ...
Louis Jones - Activist Archivist, Detroit
17 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Louis Jones is a keeper— working as a Field Archivist at the Reuther Library at Wayne State University in Detroit, he cares for the largest labor ar...
Betty Reid Soskin - Sign My Name to Freedom - 1921-2025
03 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
On December 21, 2025, activist and trailblazer Betty Reid Soskin passed away in Richmond, California. She was 104. Over the years we've chronicled Bet...
The Giving Game: Andrew Carnegie and the Evils of Wealth
20 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The Gilded Age was a time of unparalleled wealth and prosperity in America—but it was also a time of staggering inequality, corruption, and unchecke...
Marion Cunningham: Late Bloomer, Agoraphobic, Food Pioneer
06 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
They don't make 'em like Marion Cunningham these days. Food writer, home cook, Fannie Farmer's new incarnation, James Beard’s sidekick, wizard of wa...
Hidden Kitchens World—With Host Frances McDormand
16 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Host Frances McDormand leads us through this rich international story collection of land, community and food. From the organic olive groves and vineya...
The Keepers—With Host Frances McDormand
02 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Keepers, from The Kitchen Sisters and PRX with host, Academy Award-winning actress Frances McDormand. Stories of activist archivists, rogue librar...
Remembering Marcyliena Morgan - Keeper of the Hip Hop Archive at Harvard
18 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Today, we're thinking about Marcyliena Morgan, a keeper extraordinaire, a linguistic anthropologist who founded and championed the Hip Hop Archive at ...
The Birth of Rice-A-Roni
04 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The worlds of a young Canadian immigrant, an Italian pasta-making family, and a 70-year-old survivor of the Armenian Genocide converge in this story o...
Bone Music - A Collaboration with 99% Invisible
21 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the 1950s, some ingenious Russians, hungry for jazz, boogie woogie, rock n roll, and other music forbidden in the Soviet Union, devised a way to re...
Aggie & Walter Murch — Family, Farming & Filmmaking
07 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Muriel "Aggie" Murch and her husband, Academy Award winning film editor and sound designer Walter Murch, have lived on Blackberry Farm in Bolinas for ...
The Real Ambassadors — A Jazz Opera for Louis Armstrong by Dave & Iola Brubeck
16 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Real Ambassadors is a poignant tale of cultural exchange, anti-racism, and jazz history. And it's a love story — between life-long husband and w...
The Women's School of Planning and Architecture: Not Only Survive but Flourish
02 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Women’s School of Planning and Architecture, popularly known as WSPA, ran for four summers from 1974 to 1979. You could learn woodworking ...
Kibbe at the Crossroads - Lebanese Immigrants and Cooking in the Mississippi Delta
19 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We travel to the Mississippi Delta and the world of Lebanese immigrants, where barbecue and the blues meet kibbe, a kind of traditional Lebanese raw m...
The Honesty Boxes of Scotland
05 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
“Some people might think that honesty boxes are from the past, from a different age, a simpler age, a more honest age, but I would say they're a fut...
Hidden Kitchens Texas — Hosted by Willie Nelson
15 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Willie Nelson and Dallas-born actress Robin Wright, along with some wild and extraordinary tellers, take us across Texas and share some of their Hidde...
America Eats - 1930s WPA Chronicle of Food, Ritual and Celebration at The Library of Congress
01 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Fish Fries, political BBQs, family reunions — during the 1930s writers were paid by the government to chronicle local food, eating customs and recip...
The National Archives – The What and the Why
17 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
“From the very beginning the intent was that the American people needed to be able to access the records so that we would be able to hold the govern...
E. T. The Extra-Terrestrial - The Worst Video Game Ever?
03 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Deep within the National Museum of American History’s vaults is a battered Atari case containing what’s known as “the worst video game of all ti...
Radio Pacific - A New Show From KALW San Francisco
20 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Kitchen Sisters are excited to share the first episode of Radio Pacific, a new monthly show from KALW in San Francisco that takes a deep and creat...
Plessy AND Ferguson—Activism and the Fight for Justice and Equal Rights
06 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In 1892, Homer Plessy, a mixed race shoemaker in New Orleans, was arrested, convicted and fined $25 for taking a seat in a whites-only train car. This...
Pie Down Here: Listening Back—Alabama Sharecroppers and Communist Organizers, 1930s
15 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Pie Down Here — Produced by Signal HillIn the 1980s, when Robin D.G. Kelley was 24 years old, he took a bus trip to the Deep South. He was researchi...
A Tribute to George Foreman: An Unexpected Kitchen—The George Foreman Grill
01 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In 2004, we opened up a phone line on NPR asking people to tell us about their Hidden Kitchens— secret, underground, below the radar cooking, and ho...
Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston - Revisiting Manzanar
18 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In 1981 The Kitchen Sisters interviewed Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston for a story about life on the homefront during World War II. Jeanne told stories of h...
The Tom Luddy Connection: The Man, The Movies, The Rolodex
27 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
House/Full of Black Women
18 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
For almost a dozen years, 34 Black women gathered monthly around a big dining room table in an orange house on Orange Street in Oakland, CA — meetin...
Spotlight on Black Pet Care Entrepreneurs
04 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Lured in by a blackboard sign on the street in Davia’s neighborhood announcing “Spotlight on Black Entrepreneurs,” we enter the creative and gro...
The Anti-Inaugural Concert: Leonard Bernstein, Richard Nixon and the "Plea for Peace" music of 1973 Inauguration
20 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Lady Gaga, Marion Anderson, Beyoncé, Frank Sinatra, Pete Seeger, Maya Angelou — musicians and poets have been powerful headliners at inauguration c...
Edna Lewis: Christmas in Freetown
24 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Edna Lewis was a legendary American chef, a pioneer of Southern cooking and the author of four books, including The Taste of Country Cooking, her memo...
Cecilia Chiang Spills the Tea
17 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
On the occasion of her 80th birthday in 2000, The Kitchen Sisters, along with food writer Peggy Knickerbocker, visited the home of Cecilia Chiang, the...
Catherine Bauer Wurster, Housing Advocate: A Thoroughly Modern Woman
03 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
A pioneer in her field, Catherine Bauer Wurster was advisor to five presidents on urban planning and housing and was one of the primary authors of the...
Beyond Architecture: The Fantasy Worlds of Phyllis Birkby
19 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Pushed to the side and rarely credited for her architectural work at Davis Brody, Phyllis Birkby became a significant figure in extending the lesbian ...
Constellation Prize: Nightwalking
05 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
It is Tuesday, November 5, 2024, the day when millions of Americans go to the polls to vote for who will lead their towns, their states, the nation. S...
The Hope and the Scope: Young People and the Political Moment
15 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
July 17, 2024, Washington, D.C. Some 200 young people from across the nation aged 14-19 — aspiring poets, storytellers, MC's, activists — are gath...
Tupperware
01 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Today, The Kitchen Sisters Present: “Tupperware” — an homage and a eulogy.It was 1980. Nikki and I had just met. We had just named ourselves The...
Manny's: A Civic Gathering Place
17 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
As elections loom, we need to get involved, step up to the civic plate, take part in discourse. And that’s what Manny Yekutiel has been driven to do...
Oprah, Kamala, and The New Orleans Four
03 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
There was a moment at the 2024 Democratic National Convention when Oprah took the stage — and the crowd went wild. She spoke boldly about Kamala Har...
Burning Man: Archiving the Ephemeral
20 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
On the night of Summer Solstice 1986, Larry Harvey and Jerry James built and burned an eight-foot wooden figure on San Francisco's Baker Beach surroun...
Henri Langlois and the Cinémathèque Française
06 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In honor of the Paris Olympics and the astounding contribution of the French to culture and art of the world, The Kitchen Sisters Present, Archive Fev...
Linda Ronstadt Day
15 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
San Francisco officially declared July 15th Linda Ronstadt Day. In her honor, The Kitchen Sisters Present this story about her book, Feels Like Home, ...
Traveling Route 66 — The Mother Road
02 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Route 66—The Main Street of America— the first continuously paved highway linking east and west was the most traveled and well known road in the U...
Laying the Groundwork: Women in American Architecture, Spring 1977
18 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In 1977, a cavernous, rarely used sculpture gallery in the Brooklyn Museum was filled with drafting tables, their tops tilted to display collages of t...
A Floating City Vision - Mirabeau Water Garden, New Orleans
04 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
As this year's hurricane season ramps up, we go to New Orleans for a kind of biblical reckoning. A story of science and prayer, with a cast of improba...
Dissident Kitchens
21 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
On February 16, 2024 Russian dissident Alexei Navalny died under unexplained circumstances in a penal colony in the Russian Arctic just weeks before t...
Eleanor Coppola: Notes on a Life
07 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
On April 12, 2024, Eleanor Coppola, artist, filmmaker, mother and wife of director Francis Ford Coppola, died at her home in the Napa Valley surrounde...
Cool Hair, Great Smile: Remembering Knox Phillips
16 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Over the years, The Kitchen Sisters have zeroed in on Memphis, Tennessee in a big way. The inspiration for that and the inspiration for some of our fa...
The Romance and Sex Life of the Date
02 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In 1898, the United States Department of Agriculture created a special department of men, called “Agriculture Explorers,” to travel the globe sear...
Parsi New Year—First Day of Spring
19 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Niloufer Ichaporia King lives in a house with three kitchens. She prowls through six farmer’s markets a week in search of unusual greens, roots, see...
Buildings Speak: Stories of Pioneering Women Architects hosted by Frances McDormand
05 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Little known stories of pioneering architects — Julia Morgan, the first accredited female architect in California, who designed Hearst Castle and w...
Black Chef, White House—African American Chefs in the President's Kitchen
20 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
A look at the President’s kitchen and some of the first cooks to feed the Founding Fathers—Hercules and James Hemings—the enslaved chefs of Geor...
The Mardi Gras Indians—Stories from New Orleans
06 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Jelly Roll Morton talks of being a “Spy Boy” in the Mardi Gras Indian parades of his youth. Bo Dollis, of the Wild Magnolias, tells of sewing his ...
230 - Architecture, Family Style – Sarah Harkness & Jean Fletcher
16 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Sarah “Sally” Pillsbury and Jean B. Fletcher were both architects who married architects. The two women and their husbands were founding members o...
229 - The Pancake Years - For Lenny on Christmas Eve
24 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
For five years Davia’s father, Lenny Nelson, asked her to go to Rattlesden, England, to visit the Air Force base where he was stationed during W...
Emily Dickinson's Hidden Kitchen—Black Cake
19 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Deep in the hidden archives of Harvard’s Houghton Library are the butter stained recipes of Emily Dickinson. Who knew? Emily Dickinson was better ...
Lou Reed's Tai Chi
05 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Lou Reed, musician, rock icon, poet, leader of the legendary Velvet Underground, was obsessed with tai chi — the practice, the community, the health...
226 - Kimchi Diplomacy—Hidden Kitchens: War & Peace and Food
21 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Late autumn is Kimjang season in the Republic of Korea when families and communities come together to make and share large quantities of kimchi to ens...
Architect Anna Wagner Keichline: The Legacy of Invention
07 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Anna Wagner Keichline (1889–1943) was the first registered woman architect in Pennsylvania and was among the first registered women architects in th...
224 - Make Coffee Black Again
17 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, we borrow a cup of sound from the podcast, What You’re Eating, a production of FoodPrint.org, hosted by Jerusha Klemperer. In the e...
223 - Losing Lincoln
03 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Since the start of the pandemic, more than 90 colleges have merged or closed permanently. One of these schools, Lincoln College, closed its doors with...
222 - Filmmaker Wim Wenders—The Entire Caboddle
19 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Filmmaker Wim Wenders premiered two new films at Cannes this year — Anselm, a 3-D, cutting edge documentary about the contemporary German painter an...
221 - Lena Richard - America's Unknown Celebrity Chef
05 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
When Lena Richard cooked her first chicken on television, she beat Julia Child to the screen by over a decade. At a time when most African American ...
220 - Archiving the Underground — Hip Hop at Harvard & Cornell
15 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We delve into the story of the founding of the Hiphop Archive and Research Institute at Harvard by Dr. Marcyliena Morgan, Professor of African and Afr...
219 - Edith Warner's Atomic Tea Room
01 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
It was top secret. But everyone in Santa Fe knew there was something going on up on the hill in the remote, desert mountains of Los Alamos in 1943. J....
218 - Remembering "The Day After Trinity - J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb"
18 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In 1981, The Kitchen Sisters interviewed filmmaker Jon Else about his Academy Award nominated documentary, The Day After Trinity, a deeply moving film...
217 - International Congress of Youth Voices—Youth on Fire
04 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Behind the scenes at the International Congress of Youth Voices when 131 youth activists,13 to 26 years old, from 37 countries — students, writers, ...
216 - Amaza Lee Meredith, African American Architect: Love & Home
20 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Born in 1895 in Lynchburg, VA, Amaza Lee Meredith was an African American architect, artist and educator who taught at Virginia State College where sh...
215—Prince and the Technician
06 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In 1983 Prince hired LA sound technician Susan Rogers, one of the few women in the industry, to move to Minneapolis and help upgrade his home recordin...
214 - The Passion of Chris Strachwitz 1931-2023 —Arhoolie Records
16 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Chris was a man possessed. “El Fanatico,” Ry Cooder called him. A song catcher, dedicated to recording the traditional, regional, down home music ...
213 - Ada Louise Huxtable, Architecture Critic: The Art We Must Live With
02 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Ada Louise Huxtable, who “invented” the profession of architecture critic, wrote countless articles for two great daily newspapers and had a gigan...
212 - Tony Schwartz Centennial- 30,000 Recordings Later
18 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Cab drivers, children’s jump rope rhymes, folk songs, dialects, controversial TV ads, interviews with blacklisted artists and writers during the Mc...
211 - House/Full of Black Women
28 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
For some eight years now thirty-four Black women have gathered monthly around a big dining room table in the orange house on Orange Street in Oakland,...
210-Ray Eames—Industrial Designer & Artist: Beauty in the Everyday
21 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Many know Ray Eames as the small, dirndled woman behind her more famous husband, Charles Eames. But Ray was the industrial designer bending plywood in...
209 - Black Reconstruction in America - W.E.B. Du Bois' 1935 Groundbreaking / Myth-Busting Book
07 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In 1935, W. E. B. Du Bois, scholar, public intellectual, and social and political activist, published his magnum opus: Black Reconstruction in America...
208 - Never a Man Spake Like This Man: The Black Preacher As Performing Artist
21 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In the early 1980s, Black students and the African American community at American University had been demonstrating for more access and inclusion in t...
207 - The Golden Arches in Black America
07 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Criticisms of fast food often focus on the industrialized system that produces the burgers, buns and fries, or the food’s negative health impacts. S...
206 - Curtis "Wall Street" Carroll - The Stock Market Wizard of San Quentin is Released!
17 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In 2015 we presented this story about Curtis Carroll, the Stock Market Wizard of San Quentin. Everyone in San Quentin called him Wall Street. He was t...
205-Silent Echoes: Sound Artist Bill Fontana —The Bells of Notre Dame
03 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Since the devastating 2019 fire at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, the ringing of the cathedral’s bells has ceased. Sound artist, Bill Fontana, know...
204 - Library of Congress Acquires Kitchen Sisters' Audio Collection - KQED Forum Interview
20 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Over 7000 hours of interviews, oral histories, songs, field recordings, along with photographs, notebooks, journals, and research material created by ...
203 - A San Quentin Wedding
06 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Edmond Richardson is an audio producer for Uncuffed, a KALW podcast produced by people in prison. Recently, Edmond and his love, Avelina, got married ...
202 — Harvesting Wild Rice—White Earth Ojibwe Land Recovery Project
15 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Each fall, the Ojibwe tribes of northern Minnesota harvest wild rice by hand. It’s a long process that begins with families in canoes venturing into...
201- From Nashville to Nairobi: A History of Country Western Music in Kenya
01 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We trace the history of country music in Kenya, dating back to the 1920s and 30s when local populations first heard Jimmie Rodgers on early country we...
200 - Manny’s: A Civic Gathering Place
18 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
As elections loom, we need to get involved, step up to the civic plate, take part in discourse. And that’s what Manny Yekutiel has been driven to do...
Linda Ronstadt: Feels Like Home - A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands
04 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The legendary Linda Ronstadt has a new book out. Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands — a historical, musical, edible memoir that spa...
198 - The Real Ambassadors: Dave Brubeck, Iola Brubeck, and Louis Armstrong
20 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The story of The Real Ambassadors, a jazz musical created by Dave Brubeck and Iola Brubeck for Louis Armstrong in the 1950/60s—a poignant tale of c...
197 - What Fire Reveals: Stories from the Amah Mutsun, Big Basin and the Lightning Fires in the Santa Cruz Mountains
06 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In the early morning hours of August 16, 2020, 12,000 lightning strikes exploded across northern California, igniting more than 585 wildfires. In the ...
196 - Afghan Women Refugees in America (Rebroadcast)
16 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In August, 2021, a group of young Afghan women journalists, musicians and activists fled their country in fear for their lives when the Taliban took...
195 - Sheikh Imam: Egypt's Voice of Dissent
02 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
A blind oud player from humble beginnings, Sheikh Imam’s destiny changed drastically when he met a dissident poet called Ahmed Fouad Negm in 1960s C...
194 - From Pinoy to Punk — The Rise of the Mabuhay Gardens
19 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Originally a Filipino restaurant and music club, The Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco’s North Beach transformed into a mecca for Bay Area punk and N...
193 - Afghan Women Refugees in America
05 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The story of a group of young Afghan women journalists, musicians and activists, how they fled their country in fear for their lives when the Taliba...
192 - Monterey Pop Festival Revisited
21 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Long before there was Coachella, Outside Lands Festival, and the popular music gatherings of today, the Monterey Pop Festival was the first of its kin...
The Egg Wars and the Farallon Islands
07 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Egg Wars—a hidden Gold Rush kitchen—when food was scarce and men died for eggs.We travel out to the forbidding Farallon Islands, 27 miles outs...
190 - Florence Knoll: Total Design
17 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
As an architect, Florence Knoll was the force behind the seamless integration of furniture, space, textile, art, graphic design into a perfect brand c...
189 - Hillary and Huma
03 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Late last year Hillary Rodham Clinton and best-selling Canadian mystery writer, Louise Penny, came out with a ripping geo-political thriller called St...
188 - Fast Food and Radical Rooflines: Helen Fong Shapes Los Angeles Coffee Shops
19 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Helen Fong, one of the few women practicing architecture in the US in the 1950s, is best known for her “Googie” California coffee shop architectur...
187 - Norma Sklarek: An Extremely Bold Hand
05 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Norma Sklarek (1926-2012) had many “firsts”. She was often credited at the start of her career as the first Black Women architect to be licensed i...
186 - Coal + Ice: Visualizing the Climate Crisis
15 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Coal + Ice, a powerful global exhibition of photographs, videos, and immersive imagery that focuses on the climate crisis and provokes action is now o...
185 - Natalie de Blois — To Tell the Truth
01 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Natalie de Blois loved systems – understanding how things worked. For her, it wasn’t just pretty buildings, she challenged the code and question...
184 - The Road Ranger—My Business Is Trouble
22 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We first caught sight of him in a convenience store buying Marlboros and a Coke for the road. He was dressed in a grey jumpsuit, pants tucked into bla...
183 - That Cheap, Delicious, Rotisserie Chicken
15 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Cheap rotisserie chicken sold everywhere in markets and grocery outlets. Why is that chicken so cheap? How was it raised and what’s even in it? How ...