Opie has done that in spades, winning accolades as the first recipient of the Emerging Artist Award from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and Citibank Private Bank, as a Freund Fellow at Washington University and the St. Louis Art Museum in Missouri, an artist-in-residence at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and, last year, one of five winners of the Alpert Awards in the Arts, given to mid-career artists of various media sponsored by CalArts and the Herb Alpert Foundation. Her photographs have been shown worldwide, from the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Centre Georges Pompidour in Paris to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Although she travels extensively, she is also drawn to teaching and students. She has taught at Yale, Columbia, UC Irvine and Chapman College (now Chapman University). Since 2001, she has been part of UCLA's preeminent Department of Art.

In her search for special places to photograph, Opie now plans to use any time she can squirrel away to travel to Chicago, Pittsburgh and Houston to complete her series on American cities. "What I love the most about photography is its relationship to the documentary, to reporting an idea of community in history," says Opie. "That's what I'm completely in love with."

UCLA Magazine Associate Editor Cynthia Lee writes frequently about culture and the arts.

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