Matthew Connors uses photography and creative writing as means to expand notions of the documentary and convey the emotional and intellectual weight of historical, cultural and political realties. In this lecture, Conners will discuss his recent bodies of work in which he has been drawn to valences of friction between governments and the collective will of their citizenry. This pursuit 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.
Matthew Connors (b. 1976, Port Washington, NY) lives and works in New York City. His work has 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 has received the 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 Traveling Fellowship from the Yale School of Art. He was awarded the 2016 ICP Infinity Award for his publication Fire in Cairo.
He received a BA in English Literature from the University of Chicago and a MFA in Photography from Yale University. Since 2004 he has been teaching at the Massachusetts College of Art & Design in Boston where he is a Professor in the Photography Department.