Benjamin K. Roe has more than 25 years of leadership in radio and public media. He was General Manager of WDAV Classical Public Radio, the listener-supported public radio service of Davidson College from 2008 to 2011, and in that time created regionally and nationally recognized intiatives and projects for the station which include Concierto, a classical music service in Spanish and English; Radio Chopin, a series of 200 short stories on the life and music of Fryderyk Chopin; and extensive summer music festival coverage at Spoleto in Charleston, SC, the Brevard Music Center, Brevard, NC and the Eastern Music Festival, Greensboro, NC.
He is a 20-year veteran of National Public Radio, and served as its Director of Music and Music Initiatives until 2007. In that job he developed the blueprint for NPRMusic.org, an online music portal for NPR and member public radio stations across the United States. Prior to that, he served as NPR’s Senior Producer for Music and Special Projects, as a producer for NPR’s Performance Today, and as a reporter for NPR News in Moscow. In his 20 years at NPR, he created and produced a number of live broadcasts, studio recordings, special programs, and ongoing series for the network, including Creators at Carnegie, SymphonyCast, A King Celebration and Toast of the Nation.
Roe has received numerous honors for his work, including a Chairman’s Medal for Distinguished Service from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Grammy Award for Best Choral Recording, as well as Peabody, Gabriel, and ASCAP-Deems Taylor awards for his work as the senior producer of Performance Today. In 2000, he was a key member of the NPR Cultural Programming staff that was the first broadcast organization ever to receive a National Medal of the Arts. He is now Managing Director of Classical Music at WGBH in Boston, MA.