Artist

Nina Riley is a multi-hyphenated storyteller, scholar, and program manager shifting between Brooklyn and Philly. Her work roots itself in ancestral memory, black queer femme praxis, and healing modalities. 

She creates containers for black femmes to explore tender topics such as sexuality, bodily autonomy and reclamation, grief, and identity. Her goal as an artist is to write honestly and vulnerably about the lives of black women and girls and to heal through the arts. She’s created curriculums, performances, and social justice campaigns alongside arts and advocacy nonprofits including viBe Theater Experience, Broadway Advocacy Coalition, The National Urban League, Jeff Kornblau Partners for Patient Advocacy, and the African American Policy Forum. Her commitment to equity frameworks and artmaking earned her the LGBTQ Center Division of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Advocate of the Year Award; The Pace University Jurors Prize in Art; and the Working Theater’s Mark Pleasant Commission Fund for Playwrights. Her work is a reflection of her devotion to developing pathways toward accessible, innovative, and culturally responsive community initiatives.

She has developed her multi-hyphenated practice in the Art and Public Policy Masters Program at New York University (May 2023) where she expanded her research on performativity, corporealities, and cultural intimacies; as a freelance director and dramaturg; and as a company member/teaching artist with ViBeTheater Experience. She currently works as viBeTheater Experience’s Development Assistant for the 2023-24 season. This summer she will lead viBeStages first ever Twinning Program in Philadelphia and act as the Co-Artistic Director of The NAP and viBe’s collaborative program: Journey To Self.