A Girl and Her Room

photographs by Rania Matar

Exhibition runs May 18 – July 13, 2012

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Award-winning photographer Rania Matar captures the interior lives of teenage girls in intimate portraits shot within the personal spaces of their bedrooms. From stark and paint-chipped to clothing-cluttered and graffitied, the rooms offer an insiders’ peek into the girls values, desires, fears. Photographing girls from both the United States and Lebanon, Matar’s unbiased documentary 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 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.Matar 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 won the 2011 Legacy Award at the Griffin Museum of Photography, and received a 2011 Massachusetts Cultural Council fellowship. Her first book, Ordinary Lives, was published in 2009.