Roberts is an art historian (Ph.D. Columbia University, 1991) who studies the philosophical underpinnings of particular African visual and performance-based arts, and the translation of cultural experience into museum exhibitions. She was Senior Curator at the Museum for African Art in New York (1984-94), where her exhibitions and books included Secrecy: African Art that Conceals and Reveals (1993); Exhibition-ism: Museums and African Art (1994); and with Allen F. Roberts, Memory: Luba Art and the Making of History (1996), which won the College Art Association's Alfred Barr Award for museum scholarship. From 1999 – 2008, she served as Deputy Director and Chief Curator at the Fowler Museum at UCLA. Her exhibitions and publications produced at the Fowler Museum include: Body Politics: The Female Image in Luba Art and the Sculpture of Alison Saar (2000); A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal (2003), with Allen F. Roberts, which won both the Herskovits Award and the Arnold Rubin Outstanding Publication Award; Inscribing Meaning: Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art (2007); and Continental Rifts: Contemporary Time-Based Works of Africa (2009).

Dr. Roberts has been a Getty Postdoctoral Fellow and held other grants and awards; has served as President of the Arts Council of the African Studies Association; and is an editor of African Arts journal. In 2007, she was decorated as a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters by the Republic of France for her promotion of art and artists of francophone Africa.