Rania Matar

Rania Matar

Fellow: Awarded 2018
Field of Study: Photography

Competition: US & Canada

Rania Matar was born and raised in Lebanon and moved to the U.S. in 1984. As a Lebanese-born American woman and mother, her 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, within the context of the underlying universality of these experiences.

A mid-career retrospective of her work is currently on view at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, in a solo exhibition: In Her Image: Photographs by Rania Matar

Rania’s work has also been exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Carnegie Museum of Art; National Museum of Women in the Arts; Harn Museum of Art; Ringing Museum of Art; Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University; Tufts University Art Gallery; Howard Greenberg Gallery; Canada War Museum; Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris; Galerie Tanit, Beirut; East Wing Gallery, Dubai; Lehmbruck Museum, Germany; Sharjah Art Museum; National Portrait Gallery, London.

She has received several grants and awards including a 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.

She has published three books:

L’Enfant-Femme, 2016; A Girl and Her Room, 2012; Ordinary Lives, 2009.

She is currently associate professor of photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

Washington Post Insight
Time Lightbox
PaperCity Magazine
B&H Explora
New York Times – Women in the World

Profile photograph by Geoffrey Berliner

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