Eric K. Roberts is an actor, photographer, and social worker. He was Creative Director of the podcast “Rhymes & Reasons” from 2012-2018. He is a permanent Theatre Y ensemble member.

Roberts began his acting career in 2012 with the Hyde Park Community Players. He has regularly performed in equity and non-equity stage productions around Chicago. In 2016 he joined Theatre Y, a experimental theater now located in the North Lawndale neighborhood.

In 2019 Roberts co-wrote and starred as Tour Guide in Theatre Y’s devised production “The Camino Project,” a five-mile walking performance inspired by the Camino de Santiago, a 500-mile pilgrimage across northern Spain. He was described as “charismatic and vivacious” (Chicago Reader), “engaging and charismatic” (Picture This Post). Theatre Y was awarded a MacArthur Foundation International Connections Fund grant to perform “The Camino Project” in Serbia in 2020.

Roberts was nominated for his first Jeff Award (Best Ensemble) in 2024 for Theatre Y’s production of Jackie Sibblies Drury’s “We Are Proud to Present…,” also nominated for Best Play.

In 2015 Roberts’s first solo photo exhibition, “Dreams of Caprices (on Chrome),” comprising portraits of Chicagoans and snapshots of Chevrolet Caprice Classics made on Ektachrome slide film, showed at the elee.mosynary gallery. In 2018 Roberts was an Illinois Humanities Envisioning Justice resident photographer at the Restorative Justice Community Court in North Lawndale. And in 2019, 26 portraits from his trek along the Camino de Santiago showed in the Bloomingdale Arts Building at the culmination of each performance of Theatre Y’s “The Camino Project.”

Roberts’s podcast “Rhymes & Reasons” featured over 100 artists, activists, journalists, and academics talking about the impact of individual hip-hop songs on their lives. Guests included Grammy-nominated artist Rapsody, prominent abolitionist Mariame Kaba, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, and sports writer Scoop Jackson.

Roberts is a graduate of the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration (now the Crown Family School of Social Work). He lives and works on Chicago’s West Side.