She is the Co-Founder and Creative Director of PietschHouse, an artist-led event production company curating art and music events showcasing local talent. She helps produce festivals, exhibitions, and programming for women and queer creatives as a Curator for Future Front Texas.

Shannon has worked with dozens of bands and hundreds of artists by booking multi-day festival lineups, managing stages, curating artist rosters, coordinating international photography exhibitions, developing educational programming for creatives, and a little bit of everything in between.

Formerly she oversaw documentary photography projects as the Managing Photo Editor & Designer at Native Agency, an organization diversifying the media industry, where she worked with numerous photojournalists to develop and exhibit projects that would eventually be featured in outlets such as The New York Times, NPR, and WIRED.

In 2022 she spoke on a SXSW panel, Art Imitates Activism Imitates Art, about the connection between social justice and creative industries. She enjoys collage and poetry, showing her work in various local zines, art shows, and participating as an artist during multiple years of the Austin Studio Tour. In 2021 she made a cameo appearance in a Don’t Mess with Texas ad featuring The Black Pumas.

A 2021 Grant Recipient from The Institute for Diversity and Civic Life and the Henry Luce Foundation, she wrote a photo essay series highlighting the lives of eight young women who immigrated to Austin, Texas in their youth.

She graduated from Columbia College Chicago with a BA in Cultural Studies and Creative Non-Fiction Writing in 2017. Her thesis examined colonial issues in photojournalism and the importance of visual storytelling as a tool for social disruption.

Contact

shannonraynae@gmail.com