He grew up in the village of Borne, today a district of Bad Belzig, in the former East Germany, where his parents worked at a collective farm.

His thesis, entitled Sprachwechsel und Sprachwandel in Nordskandinavien, was supervised by German scholar Jurij Kusmenko [de].

In 2011 Rießler defended his doctoral thesis in linguistics at the University of Leipzig under the supervision of language typologist Balthasar Bickel.

[1] After graduation, Rießler worked at several universities, including in Germany, Norway and Finland, and conducted extensive field research, especially on the Kola Peninsula[5] and in other areas of northwest Russia.

[9] In autumn 2016 he was visiting professor at the École Normale Supérieure[10] For three semesters between 2017 and 2019 he was a representative of the Chair of General Linguistics at Bielefeld University.