Born and raised in Lebanon, Matar moved to the U.S. in 1984. As a Lebanese-born Palestinian/American artist and mother, her cross-cultural experience and personal narrative inform her photography.
Matar’s work has been widely exhibited in museums worldwide in solo and group shows, including Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art), 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 the American University of Beirut Museum. Upcoming solo exhibitions include the Middlebury Museum of Art, and the Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University.
Matar received several awards including a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2022 Leica Women Foto Project, 2021 Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Grants, 2017 Mellon Foundation artist-in-residency grant, 2011 Griffin Museum of Photography Legacy Award. She was a finalist for the Oskar Barnack Award 2023, Arnold Newman Prize 2022, Outwin Portrait Competition with an exhibition at Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery/DC, and Taylor Wessing Prize with an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London.
She recently curated “Louder Than Hearts”, a group exhibition of women from the Arab World and Iran at the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC.
Matar serves on the board of BeMA, the Beirut Museum of Art.
She published four books: SHE, 2021; L’Enfant-Femme, 2016; A Girl and Her Room, 2012; Ordinary Lives, 2009.
She is working on her upcoming book: 50 Years Later: Where Do I Go?, 2026.
Rania Matar is represented by Galerie Tanit Beirut/Munich.
