About

Rania Matar is a Guggenheim 2018 Fellow.

She was born and raised in Lebanon and moved to the U.S. in 1984. As a Lebanese-born American/Palestinian 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. She works 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 exhibited in museums worldwide in solo and group shows, including Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, LACMA, Carnegie Museum of Art, ICA/Boston, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Fotografiska, Institut du Monde Arabe, and more. It is part of the permanent collections of several museums.

A mid-career retrospective of her work was on view at Cleveland Museum of Art, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and American University of Beirut Museum. Additional solo museum exhibitions include Middlebury Museum of Art, Huntsville Museum of Art, Rollins Museum of Art, and The Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum at Indiana University (in 2026).

Matar received several awards including a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2017 Mellon Foundation artist-in-residency grant, 2021 (also 2011, 2007) Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Grants, 2011 Griffin Museum of Photography Legacy Award, 2008 ICA/Boston Foster Prize. She was a finalist for the Oskar Barnack Award 2023, Arnold Newman Prize 2022, and Outwin Portrait Competition 2022 with an exhibition at Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery/DC.

She curated “Louder Than Hearts”, a group exhibition of women from the Arab World and Iran, at the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC in 2025.

She has published five books:

• Where Do I Go?, 2025, with essays by Kim Ghattas, Leila Reichert, Youmna Chamieh, and Georges Boustany.
• SHE, 2021, essays by Orin Zahra and Mark Alice Durant.
• L’Enfant-Femme, 2016, with an introduction by Her Majesty Queen Noor, and essays by Lois Lowry and Kristen Gresh. Selected best photo book of 2016 by PDN Magazine and Foto Infinitum, and Staff Pick by the Christian Science Monitor.
• A Girl and Her Room, 2012, essays by Anne Tucker and Susan Minot. 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, essay by Anthony Shadid. 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.