Born under the water sign and raised on an isolated farm in Australia during a five-year-drought, Rachael grew to revere water all her life.

After fleeing home and refusing to return at 14, the welfare authorities forced her to work in silence for the minimum of a year in a thundering Magdalene Laundry, run by nuns in Adelaide. A friend's mother helped her to win a scholarship and Rachael chose to study printmaking at the School of Art. Entering self-exile at 18, Rachael travelled widely, stopping in London, Munich, Greece and Istanbul to fund her travels.

Settling in San Francisco, she joined a print workshop. Informed by her own under-age imprisonment in the Laundry, she was particularly drawn to the basic needs of vulnerable peoples, working with groups to addresses social issues. Soon, she co-founded the San Francisco Poster Brigade and became the principal artist, making large linocuts calling for  justice and human rights in the world. They were posted around the city with wheat paste and are now in the collections of George Mason University, Emory University, SF MOMA, the Library of Congress, and others.

In NYC for 25 years, Rachael Romero led Art workshops with children in after-school programs. She earned a double  MA from Antioch University in Studio Art and Special Education based on her work with children and with unhoused neurodiverse persons. In New York, she painted the three large portraits of local people that hang in the Canal Street Post Office. Rachael Romero organized and curated an International mail art Show ANTI-WW3 and travelled with it around the USA from 1980-1983.

Rachael Romero's recent painting and films utilize Nature's patterns and images and are about seeing and being seen. The V&A, London, SF MOMA, MOMA, NY, the Oakland Museum and university collections internationally have all collected Rachael's works.

In 1993, she spent a year studying Sufi Calligraphy in Turkey and teaching Artists books at Bosphorus University. She spent a month at Bydcliffe Artists Colony in 1998  and decided to rent a studio in the Catskill Mountains, a studio by a creek where she now lives. Her recent painting and films continue to echo pattern in nature and all the gravitas of our present state. In the Shadow of Eden was a NY Times Critics pick. Watch Rachael's films on her channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@rabyaashki/videos