About
Finding Inspiration in The DArkness
Gabrielle Riegel is a queer, disabled multidisciplinary artist, trained opera singer, writer/poet, and EDM/DnB producer, whose work was reborn Between hospital rooms and palliative care. She creates bright, abstract mixed‑media art and emotionally-charged electronic music that transforms chronic illness, grief, and survival into radical self‑expression.
Her Story
Gabrielle Riegel’s story is one of reclaiming voice, body, and identity while living with severe chronic illness. As a child in Florida, she spent summers at local art museum camps, learning to translate feeling into color, line, and texture. At just 7 years old, she began opera lessons, and classical SINGING became a central part of her life; shaping her sense of discipline, storytelling, and emotional expression.
AT a very young age, Gabrielle’s life became increasingly defined by medical realities. She has lived with severe bladder issues since childhood; by 18, her bladder function had dropped to around 40%, requiring a catheter. Later, she received nephrostomy tubeS to drain her kidneys and used a walker for mobility.
Throughout years of hospitalizations and procedures, Gabrielle refused to stop creating. She brought canvases, paints, and sketchbooks into her hospital rooms whenever she could.
IV poles, monitors, and tubing shared space with jars of acrylics and oil pastels as she turned sterile spaces into makeshift studios. Her visual work evolved into bright, abstract, intuitively layered pieces that read like internal maps; charts of pain, resilience, medical trauma, and the daily work of staying alive.
Music, too, had to change. As her health declined, Gabrielle became too weak at times to sing opera as she once had. Rather than accept the loss of music, she found another way. Lying in a hospital bed, she realized that if bedroom producers could learn electronic music production from home, she could learn from a hospital. With GarageBand and a pair of headphones, she taught herself to produce EDM and hyperpop, describing her sound as turning “hospital static into hyperpop distortion.”
What began as a workaround became a new artistic language, allowing her to keep making music when her body felt unrecognizable.
Receiving a urostomy marked a turning point: Gabrielle is no longer homebound and sees this as a second chance at life. Now internationally nomadic, She uses her art to process the grief of losing both parents at a young age, the trauma of nearly dying, and the cumulative weight of chronic illness, through both music and visual art. Her practice now includes bright mixed‑media canvases, dark original poetry and writing shaped by her experiences, electronic productions rooted in her classical training, and digital work that weaves It ALL together.
Alongside her creative practice, Gabrielle has completed a Bachelor's degree and half of a master’s degree in criminology, driven by a desire to understand systems, power, and injustice, and devotes a lot of her time to both research and activism.
Today, Gabrielle’s work stands at the intersection of disability Activism personal mythology, and experimental art. Through vivid abstraction and emotionally intense sound, she invites others to see disability not as a symbol of tragedy, but as part of a powerful, ongoing story of adaptation, creativity, and hope.