Emma Riva is an art writer, author, and curator based in Pittsburgh, PA. She spent her childhood in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York but now calls the Rust Belt region home. 

Emma serves the managing editor of UP, an international online and print magazine covering street art, graffiti, fine arts, and their intersections in popular culture, as well as the founder of Petrichor, a web magazine about the arts in Pittsburgh. She is also a staff writer at Belt and a contributor to Bunker Review, Widewalls, Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle, Newcity, Whitehot Magazine, Table Magazine, and Rust Belt Girl.

Emma holds a degree in fiction from The New School and published Night Shift in Tamaqua, an illustrated novel in collaboration with painter Coyote Jacobs, in 2021. As a curator, she has helmed several group and solo exhibitions across the Pittsburgh area. She currently works in the Carnegie Museum of Art.

Bio photo by Grant Catton. / Cover photo by Mr. Man for Artists’ Yearbook