The Matriarch Project

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

The Matriarch Project is a long-term documentary photography project exploring women across the United States who carry knowledge, traditions, skills, stories, and cultural memory from one generation to the next.

At its heart, The Matriarch Project is about transmission: the space between generations, the choices that shape what survives, and the women who stand in that space as teachers, practitioners, mentors, and tradition bearers.

The United States is a country shaped by many cultures. Indigenous traditions have existed here for generations before the formation of the nation itself. Other traditions arrived through migration, were carried across oceans and borders, took root in new places, and changed as generations adapted to new circumstances. Some traditions have been preserved with remarkable continuity. Others have been transformed, blended with other traditions, deliberately revived, or brought close to disappearance.

The Matriarch Project looks at the women within these communities who are carrying something forward.

Every tradition that survives requires someone to choose to carry it. Someone must learn it, practice it, value it, and eventually share it with someone else. Sometimes that means preserving what was handed down. Sometimes it means adapting it so that it can survive in a changing world.

In the United States, that process can be especially complex. Cultural traditions don’t exist in isolation. They exist within communities shaped by migration, displacement, assimilation, cultural exchange, geographic movement, and changing ideas about identity and belonging. What’s inherited may not remain unchanged. What’s carried forward may become something new.

And transmission isn’t complete until there’s someone to receive what’s being passed forward.

Younger generations are therefore an essential part of the story. They are the future recipients of knowledge, traditions, and cultural memory—and, eventually, the people who will decide whether those things continue. A tradition survives not simply because someone remembers it, but because someone teaches it and someone else chooses to learn.

The project asks why women make that choice, what they hope the next generation will carry forward, what they’re willing to change, and what happens when there’s no one left to receive it.

When a tradition disappears, more than a practice may be lost. Knowledge held in hands, learned through repetition, embedded in stories, connected to a particular place or material, and accumulated over generations can disappear with it. Some knowledge can be recorded. Some must be experienced and taught. And some may be impossible to recover once the last person who carries it is gone.

Through photographs and personal stories, The Matriarch Project looks at what’s being passed forward across the United States, what’s changing along the way, and what each generation chooses to carry, adapt, reclaim, or leave behind.

It’s a project about continuity and loss, inheritance and choice, memory and change—and about the women who stand between what was and what comes next, preparing someone else to carry it forward.