About Raafi Rivero
Jack of Many Trades, Ace of Some.
1st person: My goal is to put things into the culture that bring people together in joy and warmth.
If it involves making decisions about the way something looks or communicates then that is what I do.
Some job titles I've held over 20+ years of professional creative work:
- Director
- Editor
- Creative Director
- Photographer
- Writer
- Artist
- Art Director
- Producer
- elsewhere:
- The Color Machine
- Unarmed
- visual links
- NBA Box Scores
- Email me
- And after years on Twitter (RIP), I'm just getting started on Bluesky
3rd person: Raafi Rivero has directed two feature films and numerous shorts, in addition to work in design. His directing credits include content for HBO, Microsoft, Sony, and the Rockefeller Foundation. In 2019 Raafi directed Legacy Lives On, an hour-long documentary for Prudential. His short film Their Eyes Were Watching Gummy Bears played more than 20 film festivals, winning honors in multiple cities. Raafi’s music videos have millions of views, including works for Styles P and Ghostface Killah.
72 Hours: a Brooklyn Love Story?, Raafi’s first feature film, premiered at the LA Film Festival and is currently streaming on Amazon.
Unarmed, an arts-activism project founded by Raafi, has been covered by several TV outlets and was featured in the YouTube special Black Renaissance. Articles about Unarmed have appeared in SLAM, Yahoo! Sports, and The New York Times.
Raafi holds an MFA in Film from Howard University and a BA in Art/Semiotics from Brown. He once spent a semester teaching storytelling to architects at Columbia University and was recently a Fellow of the Newark Design Collaborative at NJIT.
headshots
Silence.
for Trayvon & Sandra & Tamir & Eric & Amadou & Emmett & & & ∞
action: unarmed.co
Moderating the panel Blurred Colors in the City at On Air Fest 2017
Selected Appearances, Lectures, Panels, Podcasts, etc.:
NJIT – 2024, Kokrobitey Institute – 2023, No Film School – 2023, Academy Museum – 2021, Leon Gallery – 2021, Voices of Esalen – 2020, Stretch and Bobbito – 2020, Columbia University – 2019, Milwaukee Film Festival – 2019, Howard University – 2018, NBA Desktop – 2018, Parsons – 2017, On Air Fest – 2017, Milwaukee Film Festival – 2017, WxW Stories – 2016, Handfull of Wheel – 2016
Ideas a-go-go.
Say hey here.