Maria Haas lives and works in Klosterneuburg near Vienna, Austria.

After graduating from the College of Photography at the Higher Graphic Teaching and Research Institute in Vienna in 1990, she founded Maria Haas Photography Studio and initially dedicated herself to travel and reportage photography. In 1996, she spent a year in New York attending workshops at the International Center of Photography, followed by several exhibitions in New York, Vienna, Florence, and Tampere. In the subsequent years, her professional focus shifted to industrial, product, and portrait photography.

During her in-depth engagement with socio-political and women-related topics, Maria Haas’ interest moved towards the exploration and documentation of different societies and peoples who do not live according to traditional Western principles. Photographic works in this field include, among others, documentation about the Burrneshas, known as man-women in Northern Albania, the Amazigh women in the High Atlas in Morocco, or the Sámi, the last indigenous people of Europe in Northern Scandinavia.

In recent years, Maria Haas shifted the focus of her photographic activity towards the exploration of matriarchal societies. A particular fascination arose from the special position of women and matriarchs in these peoples. Her impressions and photographs of the three largest matriarchal societies – the Minangkabau in Indonesia, the Khasi in India, and the Mosuo in China – were published by Maria Haas in 2020 in her first photo book MATRIARCHS. This was followed by exhibitions with large-format pictures in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, as well as various interviews and reports in print, radio, and TV – including a documentary on ARTE.

Now, the second photo book MATRIARCHS is available, with which Maria Haas invites us to dive into the worlds of other matriarchal peoples with extraordinary images and informative texts – the Bijagos in West Africa, the Juchitecas in Mexico, and the Bribri in Costa Rica.