Matei Bejenaru graduated from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of the Polytechnic Institute Iași in 1988 and from “George Enescu” Academy of Arts, with a focus on Painting, in 1996. He currently teaches photography and video art within the specialization Photography, video and computerized image processing of the Faculty of Visual Arts and Design from UNAGE Iasi. In 2006 he earned the title of doctor in humanities, aesthetics, with the thesis Aesthetics of representing the human body in media arts. Since 2016 he has been a doctoral supervisor at the Doctoral School of Visual Arts, and in February 2021 he was appointed Director of the Council for Doctoral Studies in UNAGE Iași. In the academic year 2011/2012, he was a visiting professor at Université du Québec in Montréal (Canada).
As a teacher and a visual artist, he is interested in researching visual artistic mediums that include technology, by studying the materiality of the medium of photography and the policies of representation in the documentary format. Matei Bejenaru was the initiator and artistic director of the Periferic International Biennial of Contemporary Art (1997-2008) and currently he’s the director of the Center for Contemporary Photography Iași. His artistic project Impreună/Together was displayed at Tate Modern London in 2007. Between 2012 and 2013 he was a visiting artist at Kettle’s Yard Art Center of the University of Cambridge, UK. Since 2011, he has been developing the documentary photography project entitled Prut, whose aim is to create a visual archive for the rural world of the Prut river basin. In 2018, the project was presented as a travel photography exhibition at the Victoria Gallery Iași, at the Romanian Peasant Museum in Bucharest and the Art et Essai Gallery of the University of Rennes 2, in France. The same year, the publishing house P+4 Publications from Bucharest produced Prut, a book dedicated to this project.