Yale University has named photographer Catherine Opie as the recipient of its 2026-27 James Robert Brudner Memorial Prize. The award, established in 2000, is given each year by Yale's Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Studies together with the Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies faculty, honouring an accomplished scholar, artist or activist whose work has made a significant contribution to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and sexual-minority communities.

Opie, who lives and works in Los Angeles, has spent more than three decades photographing queer communities, friends, families, domestic spaces and American landscapes. Her early portraits of friends in Los Angeles, made in the early 1990s, combined the conventions of formal portraiture with the visible signs of subcultural identity, and her work has since been shown at major institutions including the Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A touring survey of her work, To Be Seen, has been on view at the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh through 1 November.

The prize comes with two public lectures. Opie was scheduled to speak in New Haven on Thursday 29 October and in New York City on Friday 30 October, giving audiences a chance to hear from an artist whose portraits helped bring queer lives into the language of museum portraiture.

Opie is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in photography and the Smithsonian Archives of American Art Medal. Her photographs are held in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Guggenheim.