Catherine Opie’s photography examines how identity, community, and place shape contemporary understandings of American life. Rising to prominence in the early 1990s through studio portraits of gay, lesbian, and transgender individuals within her own community, Opie has since produced an expansive body of work that includes formal portraiture, landscapes, and documentary projects across the United States.

From 2001 to 2024, Opie was a professor of photography in the Art Department at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she also held the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Endowed Chair from 2019 to 2024. She was previously a professor of fine art at Yale University in New Haven, from 2000 to 2001.

Her work has been presented in numerous solo exhibitions, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2006), the Guggenheim Museum, New York (2008), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2016), the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo (2017), and the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (2024). She has also participated in major international group exhibitions such as the Whitney Biennial, New York (1995, 2004), and the Istanbul Biennial (2011). In spring 2026, solo exhibitions of her work will be presented at the Fridericianum in Kassel and London’s National Portrait Gallery, followed by presentations at the Royal Scottish Academy and the PoMo Museum in Trondheim.

Opie has received numerous awards, including the Archives of American Art Medal from the Smithsonian Archives of American Art (2016), the President’s Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Caucus for Art (2009), and a United States Artists Fellowship (2006).