WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
Pictura Gallery presents Becoming, portraits by Rania Matar of girls and women from Lebanon and the United States. Matar was born and raised in Lebanon and moved to the U.S. in 1984. Although originally an architect, she became a photographer after 9-11 because she wanted to tell a different story of the Middle East.
Pictura’s exhibit will showcase multiple bodies of work by Matar, each centered on the universality of being a girl and growing up. Her work is a collaborative dialogue that explores the complexity of female maker to female subject, and of womanhood on each side of the camera.
Rania Matar was born and raised in Lebanon and moved to the U.S. in 1984. Originally trained as an architect
at the American University of Beirut and at Cornell University, 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 refugee camps with the assistance
of non-governmental organizations. She now teaches Personal Documentary Photography 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. In the winter/spring of 2017, she will be an artist-inresidence/
visiting artist at Kenyon College.
Matar’s work focuses on girls and women. She documents her life through the lives of those around her,
focusing on the personal and the mundane in an attempt to portray the universal within the personal. 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.
