Rachele Riley is an artist, graphic designer, educator, and Fulbright-Glasgow School of Art Distinguished Scholar. She has also been recognized by the AIGA Philadelphia Design Awards (2017) and The Webby Awards Official Honoree in NetArt (2014) for her multimedia project, The Evolution of Silence, and by Communication Arts Magazine (Typography Annual) for her typographic logo design for Holler. She has received support for her work through grants from the DigitalGlobe Foundation, USA Projects Open Match Fund, and through faculty research funding from University of North Carolina Charlotte, The University of the Arts Philadelphia, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the University of North Carolina Greensboro.

Riley has exhibited in the U.S. and abroad—most recently at Artist Replete Gallery in Chicago, IL; 1708 Gallery’s InLight21 in Richmond, VA; and Cucalorus Film Festival in Wilmington, NC. Her project, The Evolution of Silence, is included in the exhibition and book, Ambiguous Territory—which was on view at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI and at Pratt Manhattan Gallery in New York, among other venues. She was included in Artifact and Process at the Weeks Gallery in Jamestown, NY, and NORDES 2015: Design Ecologies at Konstfack in Stockholm, Sweden (with Joshua Singer and Daniel McCafferty). Other international exhibitions have been at SIGGRAPH 2014 Art Gallery in Vancouver, Canada and in the 2013 Praxis and Poetics Conference exhibition at the Baltic Center for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, UK.

She has given presentations on her work nationally and internationally—at the 2026 Southeastern College Art Conference in Winston-Salem, NC; the 2024 College Art Conference in Chicago, IL; AIGA DEC Frontier in Bozeman, MT (with Joshua Singer), VCU in Richmond, VA in 2016 (with Joshua Singer and Dan McCafferty); the 2016 College Art Association Conference in Washington, D.C., and at the CUMULUS: The Virtuous Circle (with Joshua Singer) in Milan, Italy, among others. She participated in the Art and Cartography Commission: Mapping Ephemeralities workshop in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in August 2015. She is published in Studies in Material Thinking, Special Issue: Visual/Textual (2015), Leonardo/Journal of Arts, Sciences, and Technology (2014) and DesignInquiry publications, ‘Berlin’ and ‘Make/Do’—as well as Print Magazine Regional Annual 2008 and Motion Design (Woolman, 2004).

Riley is currently Associate Professor in the New Media and Design program at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. From 2013–2015, she served on the Board of Directors for DesignInquiry. She holds a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Design / Visual Communications from Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts (VCU) (2005), a Vordiplom in Kommunikationsdesign (Communication Design) from the Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule (University of Art and Design) Halle in Germany (2001), and a Bachelor of Science (BS) in Studio Art from New York University (NYU) (1994).