Dale Rio is a photographic artist whose work explores issues such as women’s rights and humanity’s relationship with the natural world. Utilizing film and historic photographic processes, Dale employs “straight” photography to document the world around her and also creates conceptual work in response to that world. Her photographs have been shown extensively in the U.S., as well as in England, Germany, New Zealand, and Spain. They reside in private collections and have been reproduced in countless publications. She has authored one book and co-authored a second.
Dale received a BA in Studio Art from Smith College in 1993 and an MFA in Photography from Pratt Institute in 1996. In 1997, she was awarded a Fulbright Travel Grant and the Miguel Vinciguerra Grant to document life in rural Sicily. Upon her return to the States, Dale embarked upon a varied photographic career that has included freelancing, serving as a master darkroom printer, teaching, curating, editing, and currently working as a forensic photographer.
In 2018, Dale was the recipient of a Windgate Scholarship, which allowed her to study the Daguerreotype process at Penland School of Craft. She has attended residencies at Penland, the Studios at MASS MoCA, the Farmington Valley Arts Center, and Ars BioArctica at the Kilpisjärvi Biological Station in Finland.
Dale has been involved with numerous photo and art centers across the country, and in 2015, she co-founded The Halide Project, a Philadelphia-based non-profit whose mission is the support of alternative and historic process photography. In 2021, she launched Point A to Point B: analog explorations, a print publication that features travel- and place-based alternative process photographic work, and in 2022 she founded Lux et Libera, an initiative that seeks to recognize the leading role women play in alternative process photography and create new opportunities for them.