About
About Pekela
Artist. Educator. Innovator.
Pekela Riley has spent more than two decades building a career around one constant: understanding hair deeply enough to see possibility where other people see limitation. She is an award-winning global hair artist, educator and innovator whose work moves between the salon chair, the set, the classroom, the boardroom and the businesses she has built. The range is not accidental. Each chapter has informed the next.
Artist
Hair came to Pekela through family before it became a profession. A second-generation stylist, she grew up around the transformative power of beauty, but her own route to the industry was not linear. She studied nursing and pre-pharmacy before recognizing that the place she kept being pulled toward was cosmetology.
Her artistry is known for texture, shape, color, movement and the ability to move fluently between curly, coily, wavy and straight hair. Her editorial and commercial work has appeared across publications and campaigns including Vogue, Essence, ELLE and Allure, with celebrity work spanning talent including Regina King, Issa Rae, Danai Gurira and Teyonah Parris.
But the image has never been the whole point. A beautiful result should also reveal something about technique, identity, and possibility.
Educator
Years behind the chair taught Pekela that many of the industry’s texture gaps were not talent gaps. They were education gaps. Stylists were often taught a finished look without being taught enough about the hair in front of them: how texture behaves, why a technique works, when it should change and how consultation, culture, product and service decisions affect the outcome.
As a member of the Ulta Beauty Pro Team beginning in 2018 and the company’s inaugural Diversity Strategist, Pekela helped shape texture education across artistry, service and cultural understanding and helped strategize Ulta Beauty’s first enterprise-wide texture curriculum. Her education work has since extended into organizations including Dyson, where she has led and created key texture education for professional artists.
Pekela’s goal is not to create artists who can repeat one technique. It is to build artists who can think.
Innovator
Pekela opened Salon PK in Jacksonville in December 2005. The salon became more than a business. It became a laboratory—an environment where she could study hair, client behavior, service systems, product performance and the problems professionals encounter in real time.
One of those problems became impossible to ignore: women with textured hair were frequently altering or damaging their own hair simply to blend with extension textures that were never designed for them. Pekela believed the extension should adapt to the woman—not the other way around. That insight became True + Pure Texture, a textured hair extension company developed around kinks, coils, curls and waves. The brand later participated in the Sally Beauty / CosmoProf Cultivate accelerator and expanded into national beauty retail.
The pattern is consistent: See the problem. Understand it from the work. Build what is missing.
Selected Recognition
- Behind the ChairStyling Collection of the Year, 2021.
- NAHA FinalistFive NAHA finalist recognitions across 2022 and 2025, spanning Texture, Educator and Team categories.
- Southeast Artistry AwardsTexture Stylist of the Year, 2023.
- Ulta Beauty MUSE 100Hair Raisers, 2021.
- curlBOXHairstylist of the Year, 2017.
- ELLE MagazineTop 100 Salon recognition — Salon PK, 2015.
- Sally Beauty / CosmoProf CultivateTrue + Pure Texture.
- MizaniGlobal Artistic Director, appointed 2019.
- DysonUS Styling Ambassador.
- MediaWork and perspective featured across Vogue, Essence, Allure, Modern Salon, BehindTheChair, Black Beauty & Hair, Estetica and other beauty and culture media.
Build what’s next
Pekela’s work today is increasingly focused on the places where expertise can create leverage: professional education, curriculum and intellectual property, brand partnerships, speaking, artistic and creative leadership, product innovation and strategic industry work. Not more for the sake of more. Work with the potential to move artists, organizations and the industry forward.