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, was tenured faculty at UC Berkeley, 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.