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 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 Cleveland Museum of Art, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and the American University of Beirut.

In 2023 Rania had two solo museum exhibitions: “SHE” at the Huntsville Museum of Art in Alabama and “Oceans At My Door” at the Fitchburg Museum of Art in Massachusetts. Her images were also part of the exhibition “Women Defining Women” at Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Rania has received several awards including: 2022 Leica Women Foto Award, 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2017 Mellon Foundation artist-in-residency grant, 2021 (2011, 2007) Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Grants, 2011 Griffin Museum of Photography Legacy Award. She was a finalist for the Oskar Barnack Award 2023, Arnold Newman Prize 2022, Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition with an exhibition at Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery/DC, and Taylor Wessing Prize with an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London. In 2008 she was a finalist for the Foster Award at the ICA/Boston, with an accompanying solo exhibition.

She has published four books: SHE, 2021; L’Enfant-Femme, 2016; A Girl and Her Room, 2012; Ordinary Lives, 2009.