Meet Brandt Williams

Brandt Williams is a senior editor covering race, class and communities for MPR News.  

For more than 30 years he has focused on covering city and county government, public safety, courts and racial disparities. He has produced investigative stories on gun violence in Minneapolis and its disparate impact on the city’s Black community and written and produced numerous stories on the historical and ongoing rift between members of the Black community and the Minneapolis Police Department.    

Before joining MPR News in 2000, Brandt was a reporter and then executive editor of Insight News. 

Brandt has won several regional and national awards including a Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association; an Eric Sevareid​ Award from the Midwest Broadcast Journalists Association; and a Salute to Excellence Award from the National Association of Black Journalists​. He was named a finalist for the Scripps Howard Foundation’s National Journalism Award, was a 2004 Knight Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow in 2011 and 2015. Brandt is also a board member of Criminal Justice Journalists.     

Brandt graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1991 with a bachelor’s degree in speech communications.  

Brandt and his wife have two wonderful teenagers and two awesome dogs. In his other life, he’s a guitar player and member of an 11-piece funk, R&B and soul band. Like thousands of other Minnesotans, Brandt and his family love visiting Duluth, Grand Marais and Ely.