Richards holds degrees from Davidson College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (JD). Before turning to full-time photographic work, she worked in foreign policy and environmental law, including positions at the Environmental Protection Agency and The Brookings Institution.

MIT Press will publish her forthcoming book, The Inner Passage: An Untold Story of Black Resistance Along a Southern Waterway (April 2026), which features 60 of her wet-plate collodion photographs alongside essays by Dr. Imani Perry and James Estrin. An academic study on the Inner Passage that Richards co-authored will appear in The William & Mary Quarterly (April 2026): “‘To and Fro by Canoo and Boat’: How Slave-Made Transport Canals Launched South Carolina’s Export Economy, 1690–1740.”

Richards’ photographs and research were featured in Smithsonian Magazine (March 2022) in the article “What the Haunting ‘Inner Passage’ Represented to the Enslaved,” which received the American Society of Magazine Editors’ award for excellence in print and digital journalism. Her photographic work also received the Gold Medal Prize at the Lowell Thomas Competition (March 2022) and has been exhibited at the North Carolina Museum of Art, The Light Factory in Charlotte, and the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Her work was previously highlighted in the UNC Carolina Alumni Review feature “Uncharted Waters, Uncharted Ground” (August 2020). Richards is currently a Photojournalism Fellow at Anderson Ranch in Aspen, Colorado (2021–present), where she works under the mentorship of James Estrin of The New York Times and Ed Kashi.