The Henry is excited to welcome Catherine Opie as this year’s Monsen Photography Lecture speaker. This annual lecture brings key makers and thinkers in photographic practice to the Henry. Named after Drs. Elaine and Joseph Monsen, the series is designed to further knowledge about and appreciation for the art of photography.

Catherine Opie (b. 1961, Sandusky, OH; lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) is an artist working with photography, film, collage, and ceramics. Opie's photographs include series of portraits and American urban landscapes, ranging in format from large-scale color works to smaller black and white prints. Moving from the territory of the body to the framework of the city, Opie's various photographic series are linked together by a conceptual framework of cultural portraiture. Her work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States and abroad, and is held in over 50 major collections throughout the world. Opie was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019, the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art Medal in 2016, the Julius Shulman Excellence in Photography Award in 2013, and a United States Artists Fellowship in 2006, among others. In 2008/09, the Guggenheim Museum in New York hosted a mid-career exhibition of the artist's work, titled Catherine Opie: American Photographer. In 2017, a large survey of Opie’s work opened at the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in Norway. Recent projects include a permanent photographic installation for the Los Angeles Federal Courthouse in 2016 and her book 700 Nimes Road, a portrait of Elizabeth Taylor, published by Prestel in 2015. She debuted her first film, The Modernist, at Regen Projects, Los Angeles in 2018, and will open an exhibition titled Rhetorical Landscapes at Regen Projects in February 2020. 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. She is the Lynda and Steward Resnick endowed Chair in Art and Professor of Photography at UCLA.