Rachele Riley
Education
MFA Design/Visual Communication, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, 2005.
Vordiplom Communication Design, Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design, Halle, Germany, 2001.
BS Studio Art, New York University, New York, NY, 1994.
Biography and Creative Research Activity
Rachele Riley is an artist, graphic designer, and researcher whose work is focussed on typographics, letter forms and type design, image-making and digital collage, interaction and motion design, archives and visual data. Through poetic and research-based approaches, Riley’s work explores movement, senses, and phenomena, text and the body, conflict and land-/water-scapes, and design ecologies. Her work has been recognized by The Webby Awards, Communication Arts Magazine, AIGA Philadelphia, Print Magazine, and the DigitalGlobe Foundation. Before joining the UNCG School of Art in 2017, Riley taught design at the University of the Arts, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of North Carolina Charlotte, and Virginia Commonwealth University. She is currently Associate Professor of New Media and Design at UNCG, and is based in Durham, NC.
Subjects Taught
- Typography
- Type Design
- Lettering
- Imaging
- Graphic Design
- Identity Systems
- Publication Design
- Motion Design
- Design Research
Scholarly Creative/Research Activity
Rachele Riley has presented, published, and exhibited her work in national and international settings—at Artist Replete Gallery in Chicago, IL (2024); 1708 Gallery’s InLight21 in Richmond, VA (2021); Pratt Manhattan Gallery in New York (2019); the Cucalorus Film Festival in Wilmington, NC (2018); the Baltic Centre in Gateshead, UK (2013); SIGGRAPH in Vancouver, Canada (2014), among other venues. Recently, Riley was invited to join the L’Internationale Summer School: Landscape (post) Conflict program at the Irish Museum of Modern Art/NCAD in Dublin, Ireland in 2025, and she was selected as an Alternate for a 2025–2026 Fulbright Award by the US-UK Fulbright Commission.
Riley’s project, “The Evolution of Silence,” 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 was 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 graphic 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 (Rotovision/Woolman, 2004).
Riley 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.
Riley has received research funding from the University of North Carolina Charlotte, University of the Arts, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and UNCG. 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 and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, and a participant at DesignInquiry (DI), including a collective DI residency at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit’s DEPE Space.