Rio Holaday

Rio Holaday has always wanted to know what makes people tick, and she uses facilitation, graphic recording, and hard conversations to find out. She has a strong grounding in social justice and public health, and is currently a Culture of Health Leader with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Rio’s graphic recording practice involves listening, synthesizing, and documenting conversations live and large-scale using images and words. She centers social justice and racial equity in her practice, and constantly asks how graphic practitioners can normalize oppressed stories and stop using visuals that perpetuate stereotypes.

Rio was formerly the Director of HOPE Collaborative and a Senior Policy Analyst at ChangeLab Solutions, both in Oakland. She co-founded Rebel Ventures, a social enterprise that works with high school students to make healthy snacks to sell in corner stores and schools, and conducted research on food access in Philadelphia. Rio is a former Fulbright Scholar and worked in refugee resettlement in Vermont. She received her MPH from the University of Pennsylvania, a master’s degree in Forced Migration from the University of the Witwatersrand, and bachelor’s degree from Wesleyan University.