Catherine Opie

Catherine Sue Opie (born 1961) is an American fine art photographer and educator. She lives and works in Los Angeles, as a professor of photography at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Opie studies the connections between mainstream and infrequent society. By specializing in portraiture, studio, and landscape photography, she is able to create pieces relating to sexual identity. Through photography, Opie documents the relationship between the individual and the space inhabited.

She is known for her portraits exploring the Los Angeles leather-dyke community. Her work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and she has won awards including the United States Artists Fellowship (2006) and the President’s Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Women’s Caucus for Art (2009).

Opie was born in Sandusky, Ohio. She spent her early childhood in Ohio and was influenced heavily by photographer Lewis Hine. On her 9th birthday, she received a Kodak Instamatic camera and immediately began taking photographs of her family and community. One of her first photographs was a self-portrait of her making muscles. She evolved as an artist at age 14 when she created her own darkroom. Her family moved from Ohio to California in 1975. She earned a Bachelor of Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1985.

She later received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in 1988. Before arriving at CalArts, she was a strictly black-and-white photographer. Opie's thesis project entitled Master Plan (1988) examined a wide variety of topics. Her early work was said to focus on the raping of landscapes. The project looked deeper into construction sites, advertisement schemes, homeowner regulations, and the interior layout of their homes within the community of Valencia, California.

In 1988, Opie moved to Los Angeles, California, and began working as an artist. She supported herself by accepting a job as a lab technician at the University of California, Irvine. Opie and her former partner, painter Julie Burleigh, constructed working studios in the backyard of their home in South Central Los Angeles.

In 2001, Opie gave birth to a boy named Oliver through intrauterine insemination.

At the Hammer Museum, Opie was on the first Artist Council (a series of sessions with curators and museum administrators) and served on the board of overseers. Along with fellow artists John Baldessari, Barbara Kruger, and Ed Ruscha, Opie served as a member of the board for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. In 2012, she and the others resigned; however, they joined the museum's 14-member search committee for a new director after Jeffrey Deitch's resignation in 2013. Opie returned in support of the museum's new director, Philippe Vergne, in 2014. She was also on the board of the Andy Warhol Foundation.