SOCAL | Women of Influence: Studio Visit with Michele Mattei

Image: Michele Mattei, Portrait of Betye Saar

ArtTable SoCal invites you to join us for a visit to Michele Mattei’s studio, where we will view this and other photographic portfolios. The evening will also be devoted to networking among ArtTable SoCal members. Refreshments will be served.

Women of Influence is the name of a collection of portraits and conversations with some of the world ‘s most extraordinary women by renowned photographer and ArtTable member Michele Mattei. The series includes images of political activists Betty Friedan, Dolores Huerta, and Bette Bao Lord, of artists Louise Bourgeois, Betye Saar, and Beatrice Wood, and of other outstanding women who empowered and inspired generations worldwide in literature, finance, fashion, dance, and more. A selection of the portraits were presented at the National Museum of Women in the Arts under the title Fabulous! for their twenty-fifth anniversary celebration.

Michele Mattei has had a long and distinguished career as a journalist, photojournalist, filmmaker, and fine art photographer. Born in Paris, she attended L’Ecole Normale Superieure and then studied Political Sciences at the University of Chile. While there, she was recruited by Gamma, the premiere French photo agency, to open and head their first Latin American Bureau. During this time, Michele traveled throughout the continent to cover political stories, civil unrest, indigenous peoples, environmental problems, and women’s issues. She obtained exclusive interviews with several heads of state including Eduardo Frei, Salvador Allende, Augusto Pinochet, the presidents of Chile, and Juan and Isabel Peron, the presidents of Argentina. As the political situation became more dangerous, she relocated to California and initiated her own photo agency, Mega Productions, supplying photographs and texts to media networks in 21 countries. This work incorporated diverse projects including advertising campaigns, books, and film.

Mattei wrote and co-produced The Longest Holiday, a video program on the joys of aging, which was selected for the New York Film Festival. In 2007, she filmed a documentary in Ethiopia on the team of doctors who travel to remote locations to repair children’s cleft palates. An experimental cinema project followed in which she collaborated with resident patients at the Mental Institute of Thuir in France as a therapeutic aid to their illness.

Publishing internationally (in Paris Match, Vogue, GQ, …), she has interviewed and photographed over a hundred Hollywood celebrities, among them Richard Gere, Clint Eastwood, Tom Cruise, Bill Pullman, and Muhammad Ali.

As a fine art photographer, she has developed several series:
Butterflies: Image and Imago
Flowers: Style, Stigma and Stamen
Shells: Fibonacci by the Sea
Portraits: Women of Age, Influence and Accomplishment, which is of relevance to the ArtTable visit.

Her portraiture and fine art have been exhibited worldwide. Her work is in the collections of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Newseum, and in the archives of MoMA as well as in many private collections.