Dmae Roberts' Bio

Dmae Roberts is an award-winning Amerasian playwright, journalist, and educator. Roberts has written and produced more than 400 features, audio arts pieces and documentaries for National Public Radio and Public Radio International programming. She started in public radio "accidentally" in college when she first heard Susan Stamberg and Noah Adams on All Things Considered.

"It was like being invited to a special salon where you could drop in on people's lives and be entertained, moved and informed," says Roberts. "I was a print journalism major and volunteered at KLCC -- the local public radio station in Eugene, Oregon -- and got hooked. My first piece was awful but I was enamored with the way you could combine your voice with other voices and broadcast it to people faraway. Public radio became a way for me to tell other people's stories, and then my own at a time when I didn't even have a name for my identity."

The isolation and racism Roberts experienced as part of the only inter-racial (white/Asian) family in a Scandinavian farm town in Oregon left a strong desire to explore cultural identity, which she's done largely through radio including her own personal exploration through MEI MEI: A DAUGHTER'S SONG. She followed that with LEGACIES: TALES FROM AMERICA working with other producers and writers such as Michael Johnson, Steve Rowland, Nora Moreno, Ifa Bayeza to tell their stories.

In 1990, she received the prestigious George Foster Peabody award for MEI MEI. Other awards and grants include funds from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Endowment for the Arts, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism award, the Casey Medal, the United Nations Silver award, two CPB awards and an AIR award for innovation and excellence. Roberts stage plays have been produced in Portland theatres such as the Artists Repertory, the Portland Repertory and the Interstate Firehouse Cultural center. And Roberts has taught acting, creative writing and radio classes throughout Portland.

As the executive producer of MEDIARITES, a non-profit organization dedicated to multicultural arts production in radio, theatre and educational outreach, she continues her personal mission to create works that bring diverse communities together. Her most current project is The Breast Cancer Monologues, production from outreach workshops of The Breast Cancer Radio Arts Project.

Now MediaRites and Roberts are embarking on producing the very first Asian American history series on public radio. She's in the middle of fundraising for Crossing East: First Asians In America to air in May 2006 during Asian/Pacific American history month.

Audio & Links
  Miracle on the Streets [clip] (08.00). Download: MP3 [4.8mb]
  Dmae's PRX.org directory
  Travels in New Zealand at Stories1st.org