RESIDENT ARTIST: REBECCA RILEY

February’s Cooperative Resident Artist will be Rebecca Riley. She is from Columbus, Ohio and will be spending the month of February finishing her fourth comic book, about her experiences teaching students with Autism.

Rebecca is a musician, illustrator, activist, puppeteer, performance artist, and bookmaker, among other things. She grew up in Columbus, Ohio, and moved back in 2010 after living in Chicago and Santa Barbara, California. Since her return, she has helped organize with Redbird Prison Abolition, collaboratively wrote a play with Insurgent Theatre, and helped produce a collaborative puppet show with her troupe Puppeteria.

She has organized a number of music and performing arts shows in Columbus, bringing in such talent as Missoula Oblongata, RPM Puppet Conspiracy, Perpetual Dusk at Curtsy Caverns, Oso, and slam poet Brando. In 2012, Rebecca helped found the Worm Zone Cooperative Artists’ Residency program.

Rebecca plans on using her residency to fine tune illustrations that are currently on her website. She will print and bind the illustrations into a comic book, and release it on her own Giant Flaming Dirigible Press.

This book is a departure from her past work as it is all autobiographical. The comics were written as a coping mechanism for stress from the workplace, and as a log of her growing understanding of her Autistic students. The comics also document her own struggle with stigma and developmental disability as it effects her family.

Rebecca also plans on releasing a hardcover anthology of the comics she wrote during 2011, which will include issues #1-4 and other unreleased comics from her sketchbook.