Joe Riley

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Joe Riley (b. 1990, Richmond, Virginia) is an artist, historian, and Ph.D. candidate at UC San Diego Visual Arts in a joint environmental research program with Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation. His dissertation, Fixing the Sea: Case Studies Toward A Critical Environmental History of Ocean Art and Science since 1970, foregrounds and critically examines histories and practices of interaction between artists, oceanographers, and marine life situated within California’s university-military-research complex.

Since 2019, Joe has been a participating artist and co-curator for a Getty PST ART: Art and Science Collide partnership between UCSD Visual Arts and the Birch Aquarium. On view in 2024-2025, the PST ART exhibition Embodied Pacific features projects by thirty artists working with researchers in laboratories, field sites, and archives in Southern California and the Pacific Islands. The project invites immersive engagement in oceanography, Indigenous design, and critical craft through exhibitions, workshops, and programs at six interrelated venues.

As an artist, Joe designs and builds large-scale sculptural installations that reverse-engineer vessels and instruments such as cars and boats and infrastructures such as railroads and maritime shipping networks. His collaborative work with Audrey Snyder and the collective Futurefarmers has been exhibited at venues including Clockshop (Los Angeles), Socrates Sculpture Park (New York), Artes Mundi 7 (Wales), and Sharjah Biennale 13.

In 2025-26 Joe’s research is supported by a Getty Scholar’s Program Predoctoral Fellowship and a UCSD Rita L. Atkinson Fellowship. His scholarship has also received support from UC Humanities Research Institute, Wildland-Urban Interface Climate Action Network, Suraj Israni Center for Cinematic Arts, and UCSD Nature, Space & Politics. In 2021-22, Joe was a Fellow of the Institute for Practical Ethics at UC San Diego, researching the hydro-ethics of race and gender and the problem of documentation in oceanography. Previously, he was an Ocean Fellow with TBA21-Academy’s Ocean Space in Venice, Italy and a participant in the Whitney Independent Study Program.

Joe is a rank-and-file organizer with the UC graduate student workers union UAW 4811. He holds a BFA from The Cooper Union and has taught at UC San Diego, CalState San Marcos, The Cooper Union School of Art, Stevens Institute of Technology, and Bruce High Quality Foundation University.