Martha Rial first fell in love with the power and grace of photography as a teenager studying images in Life and Lookmagazines. Her desire to tell compelling stories has taken me from the mountains of Haiti to African villages to the streets of my hometown of Pittsburgh. Her images of Burundian and Rwandan survivors of the 1994 genocide received international acclaim, including a Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography in 1998. 

Rial specializes in documentary, editorial and portrait photography. Working mostly on location, she enjoys exploring communities and photographing people where they live, work and play. 

Rial's community mural project Beyond the Ceiling, features portraits of ordinary women who have defied the odds and have become role models for their communities. She awarded an Investing in Professional Artist Grant from The Pittsburgh Foundation and The Heinz Endowments to expand the project. Rial was invited to TEDx talk on the project 

She has exhibited her photography at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Silver Eye Center for Photography, Pittsburgh Cultural Trust Galleries and at Carnegie Mellon University. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of the Carnegie Museum of Art, BNY Mellon and the Newseum in Washington D.C., as well as numerous private collections. 

Rial worked as a staff photographer for the St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times) and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Her work has earned the Scripps Howard Foundation Award for Photojournalism, a National Headliner Award and the Distinguished Visual Award from the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors. She was also named Pennsylvania News Photographer of the Year.

Rial has taught at Carnegie Mellon University, the Sundance Photographic Workshops and the Chautauqua Institution. Currently, she is the project manager for the McKeesport Community Newsroom, a citizen journalism initiative in Pittsburgh's historic Mon Valley. 

Rial is a graduate of Ohio University's School of Visual Communication. In the spring of 2017, she received an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Point Park University.