ABOUT

Mattie (Maddie) Provost (they/them)

Mattie is a 22 year-old multimedia artist and documentary photographer who attended New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, receiving a BFA in Photography and Imaging. As an artist, Mattie explores themes of queerness and gender, interwoven with family, culture, memory, and identity. Their subjects—sometimes including themself—exist as both participants and conduits for these stories. Mattie sees their projects as a combination of personal narrative and universal storytelling. With heavy influence from anthropological, queer, and social-cultural theory, Mattie’s practice can be coined as “post-documentary”; they identify as a storyteller and documentarian, but approach this role afar from traditional photojournalistic standards. Their work is a poetic blend of fine art and documentary practices as means to examine and interrogate, and ultimately ‘queer’ normative notions of art-making and journalism. As a queer person, Mattie’s art-making reflects an ability to dream of queer futures and utopias. They want to ground queer desires, dreams, fantasies, and hope into a visual reality, in that we can see our futures as not a dream, but a truth in this world. 

In 2018 Mattie’s photo essay was featured in ABC News as part of a series of student reports for March For Our Lives. In addition, Mattie also attended the School of the New York Times Photojournalism as Art program under former New York Times staffer Angel Franco. Maddie’s photographs have been exhibited at the 2023 SPE National Caucus in Denver, Colorado for the "Homecoming" Exhibition juried by Jess T. Dugan, was shortlisted for the 2024 Center for Photography Woodstock Artist in Residency program, was selected for the 2024 New York Portfolio Review, and is currently exhibited in “BODY FREEDOM FOR EVERY(BODY)” by Project For Empty Space.