The James Robert Brudner ‘83 Memorial Prize, established in 2000, is awarded annually to an accomplished scholar, artist, or activist whose work has made significant contributions for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and sexual minority communities. The Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Studies, and the Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies faculty are honored to present this prize to Catherine Opie for 2026-27.
Catherine Opie is one of the most important photographers of her generation. Her subjects have included early seminal portraits of the LGBTQ+ community, the architecture of Los Angeles’ freeway system, mansions in Beverly Hills, Midwestern icehouses, high school football players, California surfers, and abstract landscapes of National Parks, among others. She was a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow recipient and the Robert Mapplethorpe Resident in Photography at the American Academy in Rome for 2021. Opie opened major exhibitions in 2026 at the Fridericianum, Kassel, in February; The National Portrait Gallery, London, in March; Posten Moderne in Trondheim, in June and The National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, in August. Opie’s work is held in over 50 major collections throughout the world. Opie received a B.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute, and an M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts in 1988, and lives and works in Los Angeles. Opie was a professor of photography at UCLA for 25 years.
Catherine Opie’s Brudner Prize Lectures will take place in New Haven on Thursday, October 29 at 5:00 PM in Sudler Recital Hall, and in New York City on Friday, October 30 at 5:00 PM in the William P. Kelly Skylight Room at the CUNY Graduate Center.