Catherine Opie was born in Sandusky, Ohio, in 1961. At an early age, she discovered the work of photographer Lewis Hine, who documented the plight of child laborers at the turn of the 20th century. Inspired by Hine’s images, she requested a camera for her ninth birthday and was given a Kodak Instamatic by her parents. She immediately began photographing her family and neighborhood, exhibiting a fascination with community that continues to this day. She received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1985 and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, in 1988. Her thesis project, Master Plan (1986–88), examined the planned neighborhoods of Valencia, from construction sites and advertisement schemes to homeowner regulations and the domestic interiors of residents’ homes. Her early series Being and Having (1991) and Portraits (1993–97) depicted her friends in the lesbian and gay community in Los Angeles, mixing traditional portrait photography with less traditional subjects. With Freeways (1994–95), she captured the highways around her Los Angeles home in compositions that exclude people and automobiles. She continued this exploration of the contemporary landscape three years later with Mini-malls (1997–98). In Domestic (1995–98), she turned again to the lesbian community for her subjects, photographing couples in their homes. Large-Format Polaroids (2000) documents the performance work of Ron Athey in monumental prints. Traveling outside the Los Angeles area to find new landscapes and cityscapes to depict, she photographed the New York financial district, once again emptied of people, in Wall Street and scenes of Minnesota in Icehouses and Skyways (all 2001). A 2003 series entitled Surfers focuses on the California surfing subculture. For her series Children (2004), Opie returned to the studio and to her signature highly focused portraits, this time of children set against bright solid backdrops. In 2004 the artist extended a study of unpeopled urban sites that she initiated in 1997, now grouped under the title American Cities, with black-and-white photographs of Chicago. For the series In and Around Home (2004–05), Opie portrayed her residence and community as a microcosm for the larger political and social conflicts surrounding the 2004 presidential election. In another group of studio works, from 2013, Opie evoked 17th-century portraiture, presenting her subjects in allegorical poses in front of black backgrounds, which remove the individuals from any sense of time or place. Opie has had solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (1997); Saint Louis Art Museum (2000); The Photographers’ Gallery, London (2000); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2002); Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut (2006); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2006); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2008); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2010 and 2016); Portland Art Museum (2010–11); Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2011); Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University, Columbus (2015); and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2016), among other venues. Her work has appeared in the Whitney Biennial (1995 and 2004), the Melbourne International Biennial (1999), and SITE Santa Fe Biennial (2006). She has taught at Yale University and at the University of California, Los Angeles. She lives and works in Los Angeles.