Chris Roberts

Chris Roberts

Reporter
Minnesota Public Radio
croberts@mpr.org

Chris Roberts is an arts and culture reporter for Minnesota Public Radio. He has worked at Minnesota Public Radio as a reporter, producer and host since 1989. From 1999 to 2003, Roberts created and hosted MPR's weekly arts program, "Word of Mouth," hosted The Current's "The Local Show," a weekly hour long program devoted to local music. Roberts has received numerous regional and national honors for his work, including awards from the Minnesota Music Academy, the National Association of Black Journalists, Public Radio News Directors Association, Unity Awards, and American Women in Television and Radio. Chris has a B.A. In English from the University of Michigan.

Chris Roberts Feature Archive

Villains
Minneapolis-based Workhaus Collective is meeting the challenge theaters face in attracting younger, non-theatergoers. (11/20/2009)
Shubert Theater
After 10 years of non-stop lobbying and fundraising, the Minneapolis group Artspace will finally break ground Thursday on the new Minnesota Shubert Center in downtown Minneapolis. (11/18/2009)
Solid Gold
Following the release of its latest cd, "Bodies of Water," Minneapolis buzz band Solid Gold has spent the year mesmerizing critics and fans with its electronic pop. The band will cap off a breakthrough year tonight with a show at First Avenue. (11/13/2009)
Music fans in Minneapolis will be paying their final respects to the Uptown Bar this weekend. The revered music venue will close after its final show Sunday night, and then be demolished to make way for a new retail development. (10/30/2009)
Each week Minnesota Public Radio News asks three people from the Minnesota arts scene to be "Art Hounds." Their job is to step outside their own work and hunt down something exciting that's going on in local arts. (10/15/2009)
St. Paul's Penumbra Theater is regarded as one of the country's foremost interpreters of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson's work, making Penumbra's first staging of Wilson's last play, "Radio Golf," an event in the local theater scene. (10/12/2009)
Follow this week's Art Hounds to a melding of words, images and music in Winona, an exhibition of multi-layered prints that resemble mini-civilizations, and a multi-culti mash-up of light, movement and sound in Minneapolis. (10/08/2009)
The shadow of the 1980s still looms over a lot of pop music these days and for some of us, it's a decade we'd like to forget, but for the Minneapolis synth-pop duo Lookbook, the '80s represent a musical goldmine. (10/02/2009)
This week's Art Hounds are on the trail of an epic Indian/Indonesian dance at the Walker, a play about guardian angels confronting a dying god and a familiar 90s alt rock voice making a swing through Minneapolis. (10/01/2009)
This week's Art Hounds lead us to a female-focused theater company, a reading series featuring two women poets and a Norwegian vocal ensemble that contains -- women. No theme here though. (09/24/2009)
An artist-friendly physician in Northeast Minneapolis has opened a practice that's getting praised for addressing a gap in the health care system. (09/23/2009)
This week, our Art Hounds take us to a hip-hop block party in Minneapolis, a jazz bistro in Sioux Falls and a thought-provoking production in Anoka. (09/17/2009)
Two Twin Cities performers have been bringing the sounds of icons Ella Fitzgerald and Patsy Cline to audiences all summer. (09/11/2009)
This week's art hounds sniff out a free Rose Ensemble concert, the last act of an environmental justice dance trilogy and a fundraiser that's about affordable art, and not big names. (09/10/2009)
This week's Art Hounds describe a cabaret where empty beer cans are a symbol of audience appreciation, an exhibition that relies heavily on the U.S. Postal Service, and an ingeniously original instrumentalist who's below the radar. (09/03/2009)