Dwayne Bray is an ESPN vice president, production and a senior writer for Andscape, a Black-led media platform dedicated to creating, highlighting, and uplifting the diverse stories of Black identity. Bray, an award-winning reporter, editor and producer, joined Andscape (at the time, The Undefeated) in 2019 after 13 years in editorial management positions at ESPN.

Bray’s first special project for The Undefeated was an in-depth profile of Grammy-winning musician Anderson .Paak published on March 10, 2021. Bray reported the four-part, 18,000-word story over a two-year period.

Bray joined ESPN in October 2006 as an on-site news editor for Monday Night Football, the NBA, and college football and basketball. In October 2007, he was promoted to senior coordinating producer with oversight over ESPN’s cross-platform enterprise journalism unit, which includes the video investigative team.

Bray ran the network’s investigative unit for nearly 12 years, until April 2019. His team was responsible for numerous stories that examined on- and off-the-field issues for Outside the Lines, SportsCenter and E:60. Written versions of the multiplatform stories also published on ESPN.com.

Under Bray’s leadership, the team was ambitious, reporting issues that covered an array of topics such as complaints of sexual assault at Michigan State and Baylor universities; human trafficking at the World Cup in South Africa; groundbreaking coverage of brain injuries in football. The team uncovered corruption in youth sports across the country, including exposing an underground gambling ring in the gridiron hotbed of South Florida. The unit’s investigation of the relationship between the Syrian national soccer team and Syrian president Bashar al-Assad – “The Dictator’s Team” – earned an Emmy Award for Outstanding Sports Journalism in 2017.

Under Bray, the network’s enterprise unit won more than 50 national and international journalism honors, including two Peabody Awards, two Emmys for journalism and four Edward R. Murrow Awards. The unit captured ESPN’s first Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Journalism Award in 2013, and was the recipient of Investigative Reporters and Editors’ Sports Award in 2019 for coverage of allegations of improprieties at Michigan State.

Prior to joining ESPN, Bray worked at the Dallas Morning News, first as the paper’s sports editor and later as the metro editor. At Sports Day, Bray supervised coverage of the Dallas Cowboys in the early- and mid-2000s and the Texas Rangers, among other teams. He was also in charge of the newspaper’s stable of sports columnists. Bray later became deputy managing editor of the Dallas paper in 2005, where he oversaw metro, suburban and religion coverage.

Bray’s journalism career includes serving as a news reporter covering the police beat at Dayton Daily News from 1989 to 1992 and a courts beat at the Los Angeles Times from 1993 to 1995. It was in California that he was a neighbor to the Andersons, the family of Anderson .Paak, and wrote about the attempted murder trial of .Paak’s father, Ronald Anderson, even though Bray wasn’t aware that the defendant and his neighbors were related.

Bray began his career as a reporter at the Medina Gazette outside his hometown Cleveland, in 1988.

A native of East Cleveland, Bray graduated from Cleveland State University (bachelor’s degree) and from Ohio State University (master’s degree).

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