Walid Raad

Walid Raad (b. 1967, Chbanieh, Lebanon) is a Lebanese artist based in New York. He works in photography, video, installation and lecture-performance, and his installations have used tarps, foam and collaged images.

His project The Atlas Group (1989 to 2004) is an archive of documents and images about the Lebanese Civil Wars of 1975 to 1990, attributed to invented figures. Later projects include Scratching on Things I Could Disavow, begun in 2007, Letters to the Reader (2014) and the Epilogue series (2021).

He studied at the Rochester Institute of Technology and took an MA and a PhD in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. He showed at the Whitney Biennial in 2000 and 2002, Documenta 11 in 2002, the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003 and dOCUMENTA (13) in 2012. The Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, showed The Atlas Group (1989 to 2004) in 2009, and the Museum of Modern Art held a survey in 2015 that travelled to Boston and Mexico City. He received the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2007, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009 and the Hasselblad Award in 2011. His work is in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, the Stedelijk Museum, the Walker Art Center and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He is represented by Paula Cooper Gallery and Sfeir-Semler Gallery.