CONTACT
rachele [at] racheleriley [dot] com

BIO
Rachele Riley is an artist, graphic designer, educator, and Fulbright-Glasgow School of Art Distinguished Scholar. Her research explores visual representations of conflict; poetics of land/water, movement, language, and body; and material systems of archives.

This year, Rachele is working on two projects: 1. research on water stories, ecologies, mythologies, technologies, phenomena and the expression of identity and letterform design in urban and rural spaces in Glasgow, Scotland and the Scottish Highlands, and 2. writing and design research for a printed book component to her ‘The Evolution of Silence’ project on the Nevada Test Site, which includes a focus on the body and nuclear landscapes, and archival research on mannequins used in nuclear testing in the 1953 and 1955. She is interested in ways of knowing the natural world and oneself, and in exploring different connections between emotion, data, and space. Her work encompasses drawing, interactive imaging, visual mappings, and motion/interactive imaging, collage, typographics, letter forms, print and animation.

Rachele has presented, published, and exhibited her work in national and international settings—at Artist Replete Gallery in Chicago, IL (2024); at 1708 Gallery’s InLight21 in Richmond, VA (2021); at Pratt Manhattan Gallery in New York (2019); the Cucalorus Film Festival in Wilmington, NC (2018); the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, UK (2013); and at SIGGRAPH in Vancouver, Canada (2014), among other venues. Her project, The Evolution of Silence (launched 2013), which explores the impact of forty-one years of post-WWII nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site, was named an Official Honoree in NetArt by The Webby Awards (2014) and recognized by AIGA Philadelphia Design Awards (2017), and is included in the exhibition and book, Ambiguous Territory: Architecture, Landscape and the Postnatural (Actar Publisher, 2022). Her graphic design client work has been recognized by Communication Arts Magazine (Typography Annual) (2018), Print Magazine’s Design Regional (2008), and featured in the book, Motion Design (Woolman, 2004). She served on the Board of Directors for DesignInquiry from 2013–2015, co-framing the DI:DesignCity project in Detroit, MI in 2014. She works collaboratively with Daniel McCafferty and Joshua Singer as part of Different Data on a project which explores design ecologies in cities. In July 2025, she participated in Summer School: Landscape (post) Conflict, an arts research assembly at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) in Dublin, Ireland. 

Born and raised in Washington, DC, Rachele holds an MFA in Design/Visual Communications from Virginia Commonwealth University, a Vordiplom in Communication Design from the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle (Germany), and a BS in Studio Art from New York University. She has taught design at Virginia Commonwealth University, University of North Carolina Charlotte, University of the Arts Philadelphia, and University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, and is currently Associate Professor of New Media and Design at University of North Carolina Greensboro. She lives in Durham, NC with her family and their three cats.

FEATURED
VCUarts
UNCG
US-UK Fulbright Commission