Brandt Williams

Brandt Williams is a senior reporter at Minnesota Public Radio. He has covered the city of Minneapolis for nearly 25 years. And for the last eight years, Brandt has worked in the MPR News Minneapolis bureau covering city and county government, public safety, courts and racial disparities. Brandt has produced several investigative stories on gun violence in Minneapolis and its disparate impact on the city’s black community. He has also written and produced numerous stories on the historical and ongoing rift between members of the black community and the Minneapolis police department. Brandt has won several regional and national awards for his work including a Silver Gavel, an Eric Sevareid, a Salute to Excellence Award from the National Association of Black Journalists and was named a finalist for the Scripps Howard Foundation’s National Journalism Award. He was also a 2004 Knight Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow in 2011 and 2015. Before coming to MPR in 2000, Brandt was the executive editor of Insight News, the state’s largest African American-owned newspaper. Brandt was born in Flint, Michigan, but grew up in Minneapolis. He graduated from the University of Minnesota with a degree in Speech Communications in 1991.