T. Carlis Roberts

Composer | Designer | Performer | Thinker

T. Carlis Roberts (he/they) is an artist and scholar who engages sound as a tool for transformation and liberation. His professional work has straddled theater, film, television, dance, performance art, and music — each project driven by the desire to disrupt colonial boundaries of race, nation, and gender and develop new vocabularies for expression.

T’s music ranges from original songs and instrumental scoring to musical theater and a full-length opera. He is comfortable in a variety of styles: pop (old and new), folk, classical, hip hop, and various world music forms. T’s compositions and arrangements have been performed by his own bands as well as other music ensembles around the world.

As a sound designer, T feels equally at home creating realistic effects, atmospheric ambience, large multi-layered sonic events, and magical audio worlds. He has worked with theater companies across the U.S., in everything from major regional houses, storefront black boxes, university arts centers, and experimental and site-specific settings.

T performs regularly as a percussionist, singer, and bandleader. He led The Singing Bois (a QTPOC boy band), was lead buleadorx for Las Bomberas de la Bahía (Afro-Puerto Rican bomba), co-led The Crane and the Crow (eclectic folk), and is featured on Alphabet Rockers’ Grammy-nominated album The Love. In 2013, T co-founded the Spiritual Technologies Project to explore the metaphysics of early African American music through research and performance.

T was formerly Associate Professor of Music at University of California, Berkeley, where he taught courses on popular music and politics. He has published multiple books and articles and frequently offers presentations and workshops on music, identity, and cultural politics.