Inspirational Women Profiles: Rania Matar

 

Nisaa FM: - The Lebanese/American photographer Rania Matar is recognized for some extraordinarily powerful photo series such as 'A Girl and Her Room’ and 'Invisible Children’. Her work focuses on girls and women, and she has worked in Lebanon’s Palestinian refugee camps, e.g. teaching photography classes to young girls in Lebanon's refugees’ camps in 2009.

Who is Rania Matar?
Rania Matar was born and raised in Lebanon and moved to the U.S. in 1984. She originally trained as an architect at the American University of Beirut and at Cornell University. Later she studied photography at the New England School of Photography and the Maine Photographic Workshops.

Matar started teaching photography in 2009 and offered summer photography workshops to teenage girls in Lebanon's Palestinian refugee camps with the assistance of non-governmental organizations.

She now teaches Personal Documentary Photography, and Portrait and Identity at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and regularly offers talks, class visits and lectures at museums, galleries, schools and colleges in the US and abroad.

 

Matar's work focuses on girls and women. She has dedicated her work to exploring both sides of her Lebanese-American identity: addressing issues of personal and collective identity, through photographs mining female adolescence and womanhood – both in the United States where she lives and from her origin in the Middle East.

Her work has won several awards, has been featured in numerous publications, and exhibited widely in the U.S. and internationally. Her images are in the permanent collections of several museums worldwide.

The Photograph on the left is from the collection 'A Girl and Her Room' and shows Mariam in the Bourj al Shamali Palestinian Refugee Camp, Tyre Lebanon, 2009.

Source: www.raniamatar.com