Matthew Connors

Matthew Connors (b. 1976, Port Washington, NY) uses photography to engage in the external world in largely international contexts. In recent years he has been drawn to valences of friction between governments and the collective will of their citizenry. This has led him to haunt the periphery of revolutionary activity in Cairo; glimpse the mechanisms of totalitarianism in North Korea; embed himself in the Occupy movement in New York; chart the legacy of revolutionary monuments in Cuba; and track the paroxysms of protest in the wake of the 2016 United States presidential election. With all this work his goal has been to navigate between reportage, poetry, and surrealism to find different visual idioms that can render these currents of history with emotional urgency.

Connors’ photographs have been exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague; and the Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York. He is the recipient of a Lightwork Fellowship, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts Fellowship, the William Hicks Faculty Fellowship from the Massachusetts College of Art & Design, and the Alice Kimball English Travelling Fellowship from the Yale School of Art. In 2016 he was awarded an ICP Infinity Award for his first monograph Fire in Cairo.

He received a BA in English Literature from the University of Chicago in 1998 and a MFA in Photography from Yale University in 2004. He has been teaching in the Photography Department of the Massachusetts College of Art & Design since 2004.