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.

Rania’s work has been widely exhibited in museums worldwide, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Carnegie Museum of Art, 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 the 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, Fitchburg Museum of Art, Rollins Museum of Art, and the Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum at Indiana University. Her images were also part of the exhibition “Women Defining Women” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Rania has received several awards, including the 2022 Leica Women Foto Award, a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2017 Mellon Foundation artist-in-residency grant, 2021 (also 2011, 2007) Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Grants, a 2011 Griffin Museum of Photography Legacy Award, and a 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 the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. 

Rania curated “Louder Than Hearts”, a group exhibition of women from the Arab World and Iran, Middle East Institute in Washington, DC. 2025. She has published five books: Where Do I Go? 2026; SHE, 2021; L’Enfant-Femme, 2016; A Girl and Her Room, 2012; and Ordinary Lives, 2009.