Rania Matar

Rania Matar (born 1964) is a Lebanese/Palestinian/American documentary, portrait and fine art photographer. She photographs the daily lives of girls and women in the Middle East and in the United States, including Syrian refugees.

Early life Matar was born and raised in Lebanon and moved to the U.S. in 1984. Originally trained as an architect at the American University of Beirut and at Cornell University, she later studied photography at the New England School of Photography and the Maine Photographic Workshops. Since 2009 she has taught photographic workshops for teenage girls in Lebanon’s refugee camps. She now teaches at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and exhibits her work worldwide.

Career Matar has made several series of photographs, including SHE, L'Enfant Femme, Unspoken Conversations, Women Coming of Age, A Girl and Her Room, Invisible Children, and Ordinary Lives. Her portraits explore gender studies and often consider varying national identities. Mothers and daughters are photographed together and present a universal nature of womanhood in the series Unspoken Conversations. This series documents the individuality of each child. In 2017, Matar's work was included in the Biennale of the Contemporary Arab World held in Paris at the Arab World Institute.

Publications

Ordinary Lives (2009). With an essay by Anthony Shadid. Selected as best photo book of 2009 by Photo-Eye Magazine. A Girl and Her Room (2012). With essays by Anne Wilkes Tucker and Susan Minot. Selected as best photo book of 2012 by PDN, Photo-Eye, British Journal of Photography, Feature Shoot and L'Oeil de la Photographie. L'Enfant-Femme (2016). With an introduction by Queen Noor of Jordan, and essays by Lois Lowry and Kristen Gresh. Selected as best photo book of 2016 by PDN Magazine and Foto Infinitum, and was a Staff Pick by The Christian Science Monitor. SHE (2021). Published by Radius Books with essays by Orin Zahra and Mark Alice Durant.

Awards 2018: Guggenheim Fellowship, Photography, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation 2021: Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship 2022: Leica Women Foto Project Award Winner