Rachel is an Assistant Professor of International Affairs at Skidmore College. She is also co-founder of TheEbonyTower.com and co-producer of the documentary Chèche Lavi - chechelavi.com- a film documenting the experiences of Haitian migrants at the Tijuana, Mexico border.

She holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from American University, an M.A. in Public Anthropology, and a B.A. in Individualized Study from NYU. She studied in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil in 2006 and returned in 2008 to facilitate an exchange program for Afro-Brazilian entrepreneurial youth through the NGO Levantamos. In 2014, she received a Fulbright Research Fellowship to conduct ethnographic fieldwork on religion, morality, and community values in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil. Rachel was the 2021-2022 Madeleine Haas Russell Visiting Professor in the Department of African and African American Studies at Brandeis University. 

She is published in NACLA Report on the Americas and the Journal of Religious Studies, History and Society. She has also written a chapter in Embodying Black Religions in Africa and Its Diasporas (Duke University Press, 2021).