Riley Burke is a NYC-based multi-instrumentalist, multi-disciplinary artist focusing on collaborative projects that bridge light and dark spaces and promote equity, sustainability and justice. As a writer, producer and performer she combines lyricism with Americana, Celtic and theatrical idioms. She creates evocative realms and works within structural frameworks as a means to then obliterate them.
After co-writing and releasing an EP and album with her former jazz folk rock band Burke & Krowe, she has since launched a solo career as a singer-songwriter and stand-up comedian. Burke’s solo work to date explores bound and untethered states, female power and liberation.
As a composer, she specializes in scoring indie and comedy films and has written music for the SNY television network. Burke recently scored filmmaker Hillia Aho’s film In Passing, which premiered at the 2023 Tribeca Festival. In 2021, she wrote music for Echo, a feminist production of Hamlet by longtime collaborator Antonia Georgieva, which premiered in London. Burke cherishes her new role as a producer who creates opportunities for emerging artists in her commitment to amplifying marginalized voices.
Staying true to her Psychology degree roots (as a 2018 graduate of Columbia University), she can be found reading Kurt Vonnegut, watching videos on karmic liberation or trying to quiet her mind on walks in Astoria Park. Burke’s a proud recent graduate of NYU with her Master’s Degree in Music Theory and Composition with a concentration in Scoring for Film & Multimedia.