Rebekah Raleigh

Rebekah Raleigh is Director of Strategic Communications at the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago.

Her career spans photojournalism, global nonprofit communications, healthcare marketing, and public affairs. She began as a photojournalist in the Midwest, earning recognition from the Associated Press, Inland Press, and Illinois Press Photographers. Following that, she spent two years documenting communities across Myanmar, Laos, and Thailand—work that shaped her thinking about global development, representation, and whose story gets told. She later served as creative director at Rotary International, where her team's work reached audiences across more than 100 countries, and as creative lead at BioLife Plasma Centers at Takeda.

Raleigh's writing on ethics, representation, and consent has appeared in both peer-reviewed and public forums. Her essay "The Privacy of Patient Zero," published in Rotary magazine in 2024, examines media ethics through her own experience as the subject of international news coverage during the 2003 SARS outbreak. Her peer-reviewed research, "On Equity and Authenticity: Decolonizing Imagery of Nigeria," was published in Visual Communication Quarterly in 2025.

Raleigh holds an MA in journalism from the Missouri School of Journalism, a BA in art history from Wesleyan University, and studied creative advertising at Northwestern University.