A Girl and Her Room: Rania Matar Photographer

"[What's] most striking about Matar's photography is . . . its balance between the realistic and poetic. She is the documentarian as lyricist, someone who, recording the incongruous, discovers the transcendent." ?Mark Feeney, The Boston Globe

Award-winning photographer Rania Matar captures the interior lives of teenage girls and young women in intimate portraits taken within the personal spaces of her subjects' bedrooms. From Spartan cleanliness to chaotic disarray, stark and paint-chipped to clothing-cluttered and graffitied, each room offers an insider's peek into the mind of the girl who lives there, her values, her desires, and her fears. Photographing girls from both the United States and Lebanon, Matar has succeeded in an unbiased documentary that questions what it means to grow from girl to woman and how our identities spill over into our material worlds.

Rania Matar was born and raised in Lebanon, moving to the United States in 1983. Her projects—which examine Palestinian refugee camps, the recent spread of the veil and its meanings, the aftermath of war, and the Christians of the Middle East—return voice to people forgotten or misunderstood. She has won numerous awards, and her images are in the permanent collections of museums worldwide. Matar's first book Ordinary Lives was published in 2009. She teaches at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

Susan Minot is an award-winning novelist and short-story writer whos books include Monkeys, Folly, Lust & Other Stories, and Evening

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 Cornell University, she also studied photography at the New England School of Photography and the Maine Photographic Workshops in Mexico with Magnum photographer Constantine Manos. She teaches photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and in refugee camps in Lebanon.

Mater has won numerous awards, including the 2011 Legacy Award at the Griffin Museum of Photography, and at the New England Photographer Biennial, Women in Photography International, and the Prix de la Photographie Paris. She has accumulated honorable mentions at the 2010 UNICEF Picture of the Year Award, the 2010 Lens Culture Exposure International, the SIlver Eye Center for Photography Fellowship, and the Photo Review. She was selected at one of the Top 100 Distinguished Women Photographers by Women in Photography, and was finalist for the distinguished Foster Award at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Her images are in the permanent collections of museums worldwide.

A Girl and Her Room is Matar's second book, and was chosen as a Top 50 Winner in Photolucida's Critical Mass, won the 2011 Legacy Award at the Griffin Museum of Photography, and received a 2011 Massachusetts Cultural Council artist fellowship. Her first book, Ordinary Lives, was published in 2009.

Susan Minot's first novel, Monkeys, was published in a dozen countries and received the Prix Femina Étranger in France. She is the author of Rapture, Lust & Other Stories, Folly, Evening, and Poems 4 A.M., and wrote the screenplay for Bernardo Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty.