Photo: Portraits to the People
T. Carlis Roberts (he/him) is an artist and scholar who engages sound as a tool for liberation. His professional work has straddled theater, music, film, television, dance, and performance art — each project driven by the desire to disrupt colonial structures and develop new vocabularies for expression. As a composer, sound designer, and music director, T has worked around the U.S. at theaters including Steppenwolf, Woolly Mammoth, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, La Jolla Playhouse, Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, and Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park. As a songwriter and performer, T appeared on the Grammy-nominated album The Love by Alphabet Rockers, wrote original music for the Starz/Lionsgate series Vida, and toured the country in A Queer Story of the Boy Band, a theatrical concert he created with QTPOC boy band The Singing Bois. T holds a PhD in Performance Studies from Northwestern University and is currently on the Music and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies faculty at University of Denver. He is co-founder of the Spiritual Technologies Project, a research and performance cooperative that explores the metaphysical dimensions of African diasporic music, and author of multiple books and articles on music and cultural politics.