Rebekah Raleigh's photography career earned recognition from the Associated Press, Inland Press, and Illinois Press Photographers — but the credential that shaped her most wasn't an award. It was two years spent working across Myanmar, Laos, and Thailand, where she learned to be present in communities navigating realities far outside her own experience.
That discipline — of looking before concluding, of letting a subject's truth lead rather than confirming a predetermined story — is the foundation she has carried into every role since. It also made her acutely aware of what it feels like to be on the other side of the lens. In 2003, traveling in Asia during the SARS outbreak, she became the subject of international news coverage herself — named in press reports as a suspected patient zero before it was confirmed she had only the flu. That experience, and what it taught her about consent, privacy, and the ethics of representation, became the subject of her essay "The Privacy of Patient Zero," published in Rotary magazine in 2024.
Those questions have continued to shape her research. Her peer-reviewed article "On Equity and Authenticity: Decolonizing Imagery of Nigeria," published in Visual Communication Quarterly in 2025, examines how imagery can either flatten or honor the people it depicts.
Raleigh began her career as a photojournalist before transitioning into creative leadership, serving as Creative Director at Rotary International and Creative Lead at BioLife Plasma Centers at Takeda. She is currently Director of Strategic Communications at the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago and an Expert-in-Residence at the Rippleworks Foundation, where she provides ongoing strategic communications consulting to global social ventures.
She was named an Emerging Leader at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs (2018).
Photo at right by Eddie Quinones.