Catherine Opie’s technical expertise and conceptual rigor have made her one of the leading photographers in the country. She has created several notable bodies of work linked by an interest in the construction of communities, including portraits of members of San Francisco’s gay, lesbian, and transgender leather community; documentation of mini-malls, freeways, and Bel-Air and Beverly Hills homes; and an ongoing series called American Cities, which focuses on notions of civic identity. In and Around Home, a series completed during the last presidential election, explored her immediate environment, documenting her own family and neighborhood and tying the personal to the political. Opie is an influential professor of photography in the UCLA Department of Art.