Diana Matar

Download
Portrait of Diana Matar
Credit: Diana Matar

Diana Matar

Diana Matar is an American photographic artist based in London and New York. Her work investigates the unseen marks of human history and how aesthetics can reveal and critique systems of power as they inscribe
themselves onto landscapes, bodies, and societies.

She is the author of two acclaimed monographs: Evidence (2014) and My America (2024). My America was nominated for the Tim Hetherington Grant, longlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, shortlisted for the Rencontres d’Arles Photo-Text Book Award, and was a finalist in Photo España’s Books of the Year.

Major installations of Matar’s work have been exhibited in more than thirty international institutions, including Tate Modern, London; the National Museum of Singapore; the Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris; the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; and the British Museum. Her photographs are held in the collections of the Imperial War Museum; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Victoria and Albert Museum; and the George Eastman Museum, New York, among many others. Her honors include a Ford Foundation Grant, the International Fund for Documentary Photography Award, the Deutsche Bank Pyramid Award for Fine Art, and two Arts Council England Grants. She is represented by Purdy Hicks Gallery.

Diana was appointed Professor of Professional Practice in Comparative Literature and Art History at Barnard College in 2025.

cover of the book I Found Myself

I Found Myself

Fiction by Naguib Mahfouz

Translated from Arabic by Hisham Matar

With a contribution by Diana Matar

In his final years, the Egyptian master storyteller and Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz drew on his dreams, combining the mystery of what we experience in the night with the deep wells of his narrative art. These last dreams, stunning poetic vignettes—now brought beautifully into English for the first time by the acclaimed writer Hisham Matar—appear here with dreamlike photographs by the famous American photographer Diana Matar, which both mysteriously rhyme with Mahfouz’s nocturnal reveries and, allowing the reader a chance to dream in turn, opening up the texts. These sketches and stories are tersely haunting miniatures. Recurring female characters may embody Cairo herself, especially one much-missed lover from Mahfouz’s youth. Friends, family, rulers of Egypt, and many beautiful women all float through these affecting, brief tales dreamed by a mind too fertile ever to rest, even in slumber. A tender, personal introduction by Hisham Matar, recollecting how he and his wife met Mahfouz in Cairo not long after the assassination attempt on the author, is moving and likewise indelible.

Buy the paperback for $16.95

Scroll to Top of Page