Rachele Riley is a multimedia artist and graphic designer passionate about typography, imaging, motion, visual design, and digital collage. She is focussed on shaping poetic and research-based approaches to visual communication. Her multi-faceted work explores representations of conflict, water and land issues, and changing ecologies. She is engaged with the material traces of archives and incorporates various analog and digital processes into her image making.
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 in Gateshead, UK (2013); and at SIGGRAPH in Vancouver, Canada (2014), among other venues. Her project, The Evolution of Silence (launched in 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 also 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 design work has been recognized by Communication Arts Magazine (Typography Annual) (2018), Print Magazine’s Design Regional (2008), and is featured in the book, Motion Design (Woolman, 2004). She has collaborated, presented, and exhibited with Daniel McCafferty and Joshua Singer as part of Different Data, a project that explores design and change in cities.
Rachele served on the Board of Directors for DesignInquiry (a conference-alternative design research organization) from 2013–2015, during which time she co-framed the DI:DesignCity project in Detroit, MI. Over the years Rachele has received faculty research grants from universities where she has taught (University of North Carolina Charlotte, The University of the Arts, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and University of North Carolina Greensboro). In 2012, she received an Imagery Grant from the DigitalGlobe Foundation and a grant from Hatchfund, both in support of “The Evolution of Silence” project. She has been Artist-in-Residence at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, DesignInquiry, and MOCAD’s Depe Space.
Rachele holds an MFA in Design/Visual Communication from Virginia Commonwealth University; a Vordiplom in Communication Design from the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design in Halle, Germany; and a BS in Studio Art from New York University. She is currently Associate Professor of New Media and Design and CVPA Graphic Designer at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.