Roberta Uno is a theatre director and the Director of Arts in a Changing America, a national project on changing demographics and the arts based at the California Institute of the Arts. She was the Senior Program Officer for Arts and Culture at the Ford Foundation 2002-2015. From 1979-2002, she was the founder and Artistic Director of the New WORLD Theater, at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and a Professor of directing and dramaturgy. New WORLD Theater worked at the intersection of artistic practice, community engagement, scholarship, and activism toward a vision of a "new world"—one that broke the confines of multiculturalism and was an artistic harbinger of America’s shifting demographics.
A member of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers, she is currently directing and co-writing the musical Bone Hill, composed and co-written by Martha Redbone and Aaron Whitby. Her publications include The Color Of Theater: Race, Culture, and Contemporary Performance, UK: Continuum Press, 2002; Unbroken Thread: Plays by Asian American Women, Amherst: UMass Press, 1993. She is the editor of new editions in 2015 of Monologues for Actors of Color: Women and Monologues for Actors of Color: Men, UK: Routledge.