What we inherit.
What we carry.
What we leave behind.

The Matriarch Project is a long-term photographic exploration of women across the United States who carry knowledge, traditions, skills, stories, and cultural memory forward.

Through portraiture and documentary photography, the project looks at the women who practice, teach, preserve, adapt, and pass these things to younger generations.

What We Inherit

We inherit more than objects.

We inherit ways of making, cooking, working, speaking, gathering, remembering, celebrating, and understanding a place.

What We Carry

The women in this project are not simply preserving the past.

They are carrying it forward—sometimes unchanged, sometimes transformed, and often in ways that reflect the world they live in now.

What We Leave Behind

Every generation decides, consciously or not, what continues.

The project asks what happens when knowledge is passed from one generation to another, and what might disappear when that connection is broken.