Mentorship with Matt Black Matt Black

About your mentor

Matt Black is from California’s Central Valley, an agricultural region in the heart of the state. His work has explored the connections between migration, poverty, agriculture, and the environment in his native rural California and in southern Mexico.

He has traveled over 100,000 miles across 46 U.S. states for his project The Geography of Poverty.  Other recent works include The Dry Land, about the impact of drought on California’s agricultural communities, and The Monster in the Mountains, about the disappearance of 43 students in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero.  Both of these projects, accompanied by short films, were published by The New Yorker.

His work has appeared regularly in TIME Magazine, The New Yorker, The California Sunday Magazine, and other publications.  He has been honored three times by the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Prize, including their top honor for journalism. In 2015, he received the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Award for Humanistic Photography, and was named a senior fellow at the Emerson Collective. He lives in Exeter, a small town in the Central Valley.