An award-winning lighting designer, Mr Roberts (48) grew up in Wellington, and has worked in lighting design, initially freelance, since the mid-1990s.
For the past seven years, he has been a professional practice fellow in theatre studies at Otago University and theatre manager of the university's Allen Hall Theatre.
Today, he will be among about 300 people who will graduate in person from the university with qualifications in arts, music and theology in a 1pm ceremony at the Dunedin Town Hall.
He will gain a master of fine arts degree in theatre studies, focusing on aspects of theatrical lighting.
As well as teaching lighting and other backstage skills in the theatre studies programme, he has also undertaken lighting design work for the Fortune Theatre.
And he has also designed lights internationally, including at the prestigious Edinburgh Festival and in Germany and Romania.
Mr Roberts said he had gained ''a great sense of achievement'' in completing his MFA degree, working part-time.
His degree research included several elements, including three workshops and ''Dark Matter'', a final showing where audiences were engaged in an ''open and `meaning-making' process experiencing threshold states''.
Since birth, Mr Roberts has been unable to hear high register sounds, such as bird calls, without the use of a hearing aid, and he also lip-reads.
His research involved his practice as a lighting designer and ''creating states or scenarios that sit at the edge of perception and understanding''.
Such ''threshold states'', include sounds at the edge of hearing, and darkness on stage, in which small amounts of light gradually appear.
''I define my deafness as a threshold state with which I live. It informs how I create installations which operate on the edge of meaning and recognition.''
His deafness was an important impulse in his art and ''rather than it becoming a difficulty'' he had made it ''a source of strength'', he said.
''I no longer ignore it in my attempt to `normalise' myself '' to the ''normal'' hearing world, he said.
Being able to take time to undertake research on lighting had been a ''luxury'' and he had learnt much about himself and his deafness during his studies.
