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Celebrate the first lady of cooking with Martha Stewart, Jacques Pepin, Vivian Howard, Marcus Samuelsson, Jose Andres, Eric Ripert, Rick Bayless and more.
Julia Child’s Best Bites airs Monday, March 9 at 8 p.m. on WXXI-TV and streams live on the WXXI and PBS apps.
Chefs and celebrities share personal insights as they screen Julia’s most-beloved episodes.
Enjoy a magical evening of songs filmed on New Year’s Eve in 1999 at the Las Vegas MGM Grand Hotel.
Barbara Streisand: Timeless — Live in Concert airs Thursday, March 5 at 9 p.m. on WXXI-TV and streams live on the WXXI and PBS apps.
Staged as an original, Broadway-style musical in which Barbra looks back at her past, the production featured an orchestra conducted by Marvin Hamlisch.
Photo: Barbara Streisand/Credit: Firooz Zahedi
Discover the stories of four extraordinary women who shaped the course of the civil rights movement.
Of the People: The Women of the Civil Rights Movement airs Monday, March 2 at 9:30 p.m. on WXXI-TV and streams live on the WXXI and PBS apps.
Discover the powerful stories of Fannie Lou Hamer, Elaine Brown, Ella Baker, Dolores Huerta and Yuri Kochiyama — extraordinary women whose courage, intellect and activism helped shape the course of the civil and human rights movements in America.
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Photo: Akemi Kochiyama/Credit: Kwesi Abbernsetts
Whitney Houston performs in Durban in 1994, marking the first major Western artist to visit post-apartheid South Africa after Mandela’s election.
Whitney Houston: The Concert for a New South Africa airs Saturday, February 14 at 4 p.m. on WXXI-TV and streams live on the WXXI app.
Celebrate Houston’s transcendent 1994 performance, which brought joy to a newly liberated country. Houston was the first major Western recording artist to perform in the post-apartheid nation following President Nelson Mandela’s historic election.
Celebrate the enigmatic cellist whose career was cruelly curtailed by multiple sclerosis at age 28.
Jacqueline du Pré: Genius and Tragedy airs Friday, March 28 at 9 p.m. on WXXI-TV and streams live on the WXXI app.
Those who know, consider Jacqueline du Pré one of the greatest cellists of all time – certainly in the top three – despite a career that was cruelly curtailed by multiple sclerosis at just twenty-eight years old. The force of nature took away her prodigious gift and her joy of performing and she endured fourteen years of unremitting illness. However, during her short time on the international concert platform – about a decade – she had the musical world at her feet, with an expressive style that cast a spell on anyone who saw her perform. Introduced and narrated by cellist Yo-Yo Ma, Jacqueline du Pre: Genius and Tragedy, tells the story of who she was and why she was such an extraordinary musician.
It is full of candid moments off stage and in rehearsal, together with powerful concert performances. The Elgar Cello Concerto would become her signature piece and the benchmark against which all other renditions would be measured; its lamenting melody, inescapably resonating with her own tragic demise. In swinging 1960s London, the Beatles were topping the pop charts, but Jacqueline du Pre was the poster child for a new golden generation of artists and friends, who injected a youthful excitement into a staid industry a classical ‘rat pack’ that included Pinchas Zukerman, Itzhak Perlman, Zubin Mehta and her husband, Daniel Barenboim. As a glamourous and musically charged couple, Barenboim and du Pre were like a modern version of Clara and Robert Schumann; together, they devoured the cello and piano repertoire and the recordings they made continue to delight audiences across the globe. Du Pre was a blithe spirit, known to her friends as ‘Smiley’ but on stage with her cello, she could communicate the most profound feelings, found in the depths of great music. Our interviews provide an incomparable insight from those who knew du Pre best, including RuthAnn Cannings, who cared for her throughout her illness. Described as, “beyond words,” du Pre’s innate abilities confounded even her fellow musicians, who struggled to rationalize how music flowed so naturally from her. She studied under the greats – Casals, Tortelier, and Rostropovich – but it is sequences with her teacher William Pleeth, her “cello daddy,” that provide some of our most intimate and engaging footage. The affection for Jacqueline du Pre and the wonder at her playing remains undiminished, nearly forty years after her death in 1987.
This film is presented as part of Move to IncludeTM, an award-winning national initiative to promote disability inclusion, representation, and accessibility in public media.
A largely unknown women’s rights story, this film introduces you to the trailblazers who challenged the very essence of patriarchy within Christendom and successfully created a blueprint for lasting institutional change.
The Philadelphia Eleven airs Saturday, March 22 at 4 p.m. on WXXI-TV and streams live on the WXXI app.
The film explores the lives of these remarkable women who succeeded in transforming an age-old institution despite the threats to their personal safety and the risk of rejection by the church they loved.
One of the 11 priests featured in the film is Merrill Bittner, who served in the Diocese of Rochester (1973- 1976) where she was an associate at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Webster, New York, and a co-founder of the Rochester Women’s Jail Project.
Exclusion of women from ordination and other church leadership roles made headlines in 2023 when the Southern Baptist Convention banned women from the most senior leadership roles. Today, women in many parts of the Christian church continue to struggle for full inclusion in the sacraments and leadership of the church.
A group of brave women began the fight more than 50 years ago. In 1974, there was a dramatic breakthrough when the so-called ‘stained glass ceiling’ was shattered. At a church in Philadelphia, a group of eleven women were ordained to the Episcopal priesthood in what was seen as a violation of the canons of the Episcopal Church—traditionally, only men were eligible for ordination.
Photo credit: Nikki Bramley, courtesy of Time Travel Productions
In celebration of Women’s History Month, WXXI presents this new documentary on the legacy and life of one of American history’s unsung heroes, Liz Carpenter.
Shaking It Up: The Life and Times of Liz Carpenter airs Friday, January 9 at 5 p.m. on WXXI-TV and streams live on the WXXI app.
Shaking It Up: The Life & Times of Liz Carpenter offers an up-close look at the pioneering journalist, high-ranking White House aide, and women’s rights leader. The film is produced and directed by Peabody award-winning filmmaker Abby Ginzberg and Liz’s daughter, Christy Carpenter.
The film recounts Carpenter’s powerful story through new, candid interviews with LBJ’s daughters, Luci Baines Johnson and Lynda Johnson Robb; feminist leader Gloria Steinem, legendary journalists Dan Rather and Bill Moyers, presidential historian Douglas Brinkley, and the late U.S. Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson. The film features never-seen home movies, photos, interview clips of her on Meet the Press, The Today Show and The David Frost Show, and rarely-shown artifacts, including Carpenter’s initial handwritten draft of LBJ’s first remarks given as President in the immediate aftermath of JFK’s death, which she referred to as “probably the most important 58 words I ever wrote.”