“Meet the Artist” with Rania Matar
Performers
Location
About
Thursday, December 3, 2026
Doors at 5:30 pm. Artist talk at 6:00 pm.
25 Dederick Street, Kingston, NY
This event will be live-streamed on CPW’s YouTube page at 6:00 pm.
On Thursday, December 3, we welcome Rania Matar to “Meet the Artist.” As a Lebanese-born American woman and mother, Matar has dedicated her artistic practice to exploring both sides of her cultural background, cross-cultural experience, and personal narrative by photographing girls and women in the United States and the Middle East. Through intimate portraits, she seeks to focus on essence and physicality and to emphasize underlying similarities rather than apparent differences. Her photographs reveal the beauty in our shared humanity — in the universal as well as personal experience of women encountering the challenges of growing up regardless of background, culture, and religion.
Matar will have copies of her latest book Where Do I Go? for sale throughout the evening.
Join us on select Thursday evenings at CPW for “Meet the Artist,” when we host talks with local and visiting artists. “Meet the Artist” allows the public to get to know new work, hear about artistic processes, and meet friends and other local artists. The evening takes place at CPW’s gallery at 25 Dederick Street in Kingston, NY. It is free and open to the public. Coffee, tea, and snacks are served.
“Meet the Artist” is made possible by generous grants from the Arnold & Augusta Newman Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
About Rania Matar
Born and raised in Lebanon, Rania Matar moved to the U.S. in 1984. Her cross-cultural experience and personal narrative inform her photography.
Her work has been widely exhibited in museums worldwide in solo and group shows, including Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; LACMA; Carnegie Museum of Art; ICA/Boston; National Museum of Women in the Arts; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Fotografiska; and Institut du Monde Arabe. A mid-career retrospective of her work was on view at 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, Rollins Museum of Art, and The Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum at Indiana University.
Selected awards and honors include a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship; 2017 Mellon Foundation artist-in-residency grant; Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Grants (2021, 2011, 2007); 2011 Griffin Museum of Photography Legacy Award; and 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. She curated “Louder Than Hearts,” a group exhibition of women from the Arab World and Iran at the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC (2025).
Books by Rania Matar:
- Where Do I Go? (2026)
- SHE (2021)
- L’Enfant-Femme (2016)
- A Girl and Her Room (2012)
- Ordinary Lives (2009)