Rebecca Calles Rijsdijk is a healthcare professional working at the intersection of care and social reform. She is also a writer and photographer.

Rebecca Calles Rijsdijk is a Dutch healthcare professional, photographer, writer, and independent publisher working at the intersection of care and social reform. She moves between shifts in elderly care and the creative work she builds around it, using both worlds to inform one another. Her press, Sunday Mornings at the River, founded in 2012 and funded entirely by her nursing wages, publishes poetry and stories that challenge the status quo and resist the sanitised expectations of mainstream culture.

Rebecca grew up in rural Brabant and spent her formative years in the central kitchen of a care home — the first place where people saw her clearly and let her be her unruly, intuitive self. Those early years of labour and belonging shaped her artistic voice: instinctive, working-class, unpretentious, and quietly subversive. She later trained and worked as a carer in both the Netherlands and the UK, photographing the worlds she lived in from the inside: smoke breaks, night-shift corridors, rinsed dentures, returned plates, and the small rituals of people doing hard work for little praise.

Art school never quite knew what to do with her, dismissing her intuition as a flaw. Years later, revisiting her photographs, she realised she had been documenting truth long before she had the vocabulary for it. Now she embraces that instinct fully — blending care, activism, and art to expose systems that fail the people inside them, and to honour those who carry the weight anyway.

Her projects include This Lady Died Last Night, a love letter to the care home staff who became her first chosen family, and The Retirement Home, a documentary series created while living and working inside long-term care facilities. Across her photography, writing, and essays, Rebecca brings the same energy: creative troublemaking with a purpose — refusing complacency, challenging harmful systems, and telling the stories that are too often ignored.

She continues to work in healthcare while running her one-woman press and building a body of work rooted in dignity, labour, resistance, and the quiet brilliance of ordinary people.