Born and raised in Lebanon, photographer Rania Matar moved to the United States in 1984. She initially trained as an architect at the American University in Beirut and Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Inspired to document the lives of her four adolescent children, she began studying at the New England School of Photography, though she decisively turned to photography as a career in response to the divisive media culture of post-9/11 America. With her work, she strove to present a nuanced counternarrative of Middle Eastern lives.

Matar’s work is deeply informed by her experience as a mother and artist in the diaspora. Women, from girls to young adults, are her primary subjects, and Matar elucidates shared experiences of femininity. She writes, “I focus on our essence, our physicality, and the commonalities that make us human, ultimately highlighting how female subjectivity develops in parallel forms across cultural lines.” This search for commonality has led Matar to photograph women across the US and the Middle East, from urban sites in Lebanon to the beaches of Florida.

Matar has received awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Mellon Foundation residency at the Gund Gallery at Kenyon College in 2017. Her exhibitions include midcareer retrospectives at the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio, and Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas. Matar lives in Boston, where she serves as associate professor of photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.