Photo Dominic Chavez
Rania Matar
Photographer

She was born and raised in Lebanon and moved to the U.S. in 1984. As a Lebanese-born American woman and mother, Matar’s cultural background, cross-cultural experience, and personal narrative inform her photography. She has dedicated her work to exploring issues of personal and collective identity, through photographs of female adolescence and womanhood – both in the United States where she lives and the Middle East where she is from, in an effort to focus on notions of identity and individuality all within the context of the underlying universality of these experiences.

Matar’s work has been widely published and exhibited in museums worldwide, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Carnegie Museum of Art, National Museum of Women in the Arts, and more. A mid-career retrospective of her work was recently on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, in a solo exhibition: In Her Image: Photographs by Rania Matar.

She has received several grants and awards including a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2017 Mellon Foundation artist-in-residency grant at the Gund Gallery at Kenyon College, 2011 Legacy Award at the Griffin Museum of Photography, 2011 and 2007 Massachusetts Cultural Council artist fellowships. In 2008 she was a finalist for the Foster Award at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, with an accompanying solo exhibition.

Her work is in the permanent collections of several museums, institutions and private collections worldwide.

Her books include L’Enfant-Femme, 2016, Best photo book of 2016 PDN Magazine, A Girl and Her Room, 2012, Selected best photo book of 2012 by PDN, Photo-Eye, British Journal of Photography, Feature Shoot and L’Oeil de la Photographie, Ordinary Lives, 2009, selected a best photo book of 2009 by Photo-Eye.

She is currently associate professor of photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and regularly offers workshops, talks, class visits and lectures at museums, galleries, schools and colleges in the US and abroad.

Rania Matar is a Guggenheim 2018 Fellow.

Rania Matar
Photographer

She was born and raised in Lebanon and moved to the U.S. in 1984. As a Lebanese-born American woman and mother, Matar’s cultural background, cross-cultural experience, and personal narrative inform her photography. She has dedicated her work to exploring issues of personal and collective identity, through photographs of female adolescence and womanhood – both in the United States where she lives and the Middle East where she is from, in an effort to focus on notions of identity and individuality all within the context of the underlying universality of these experiences.

Matar’s work has been widely published and exhibited in museums worldwide, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Carnegie Museum of Art, National Museum of Women in the Arts, and more. A mid-career retrospective of her work was recently on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, in a solo exhibition: In Her Image: Photographs by Rania Matar.

She has received several grants and awards including a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2017 Mellon Foundation artist-in-residency grant at the Gund Gallery at Kenyon College, 2011 Legacy Award at the Griffin Museum of Photography, 2011 and 2007 Massachusetts Cultural Council artist fellowships. In 2008 she was a finalist for the Foster Award at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, with an accompanying solo exhibition.

Her work is in the permanent collections of several museums, institutions and private collections worldwide.

Her books include L’Enfant-Femme, 2016, Best photo book of 2016 PDN Magazine, A Girl and Her Room, 2012, Selected best photo book of 2012 by PDN, Photo-Eye, British Journal of Photography, Feature Shoot and L’Oeil de la Photographie, Ordinary Lives, 2009, selected a best photo book of 2009 by Photo-Eye.

She is currently associate professor of photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and regularly offers workshops, talks, class visits and lectures at museums, galleries, schools and colleges in the US and abroad.

Rania Matar is a Guggenheim 2018 Fellow.

  • METAmorphosis / OGR Award
    May 17, 2023
    Artissima / OGR
    Turin, Italy
    Launched during the 2022 edition of Artissima, the METAmorphosis project is the second episode of Beyond Production – a conceptual platform born from the collaboration between Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT and Artissima, in dialogue with the OGR Award, with the aim of stimulating and promoting reflections on the most innovative trends in contemporary art. (more…)