b. 1961, Sandusky, Ohio

Catherine Opie was born in Sandusky, Ohio, in 1961. She received a B.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1985 and an M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California, in 1988. Her early series Being and Having (1991) and Portraits (1993) depicted her friends in the lesbian and gay community in Los Angeles, mixing traditional portrait photography with less traditional subjects. In 1994, with Freeways, she made deadpan images of the highways around her Los Angeles home. She continued this exploration of the contemporary landscape three years later with Mini-malls. In the Domestic (1999) series, she returned to the lesbian community as her subject, photographing couples in their homes. Polaroids (2000) documents the Performance [more] work of Ron Athey in large-scale prints. Traveling outside the Los Angeles area to find new landscapes and cityscapes to photograph, she photographed the New York financial district emptied of people in Wall Street and scenes of Minnesota in Icehouses and Skyways (all 2001). A recent series of portraits, Surfers (2003), focuses on the California surfing subculture.

Opie has had solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (1997), Saint Louis Art Museum (2000), the Photographers' Gallery in London (2000), and Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (2002), among other venues. Her work has appeared in the Whitney Biennial (1995 and 2004), Féminin-Masculin: Le sexe de l'art at Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (1995), Rrose is a Rrose is a Rrose: Gender Performance in Photography at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1997), Melbourne International Biennial (2000), and Moving Pictures at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2003). She has taught at Yale University and at the University of California in Los Angeles. She lives and works in Los Angeles.