Elle Pérez: Devotions | Aperture PhotoBook Club

Catherine Opie (born in Sandusky, Ohio, 1961) is an American photographer and educator. Her work has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at institutions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Opie’s photographs are held in more than fifty international public and private collections, such as the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York; Library of Congress, Washington, DC; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. She has received numerous honors and awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship (2018), a United States Artists Fellowship (2016), and the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art Medal (2016). Opie earned a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from CalArts and previously served as the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Endowed Chair and professor of photography at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Elle Pérez (born in New York, 1989) is a photographer based in New York. Their work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams; and MoMA ps1, Public Art Fund, and American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York. Pérez was a featured artist in the 2019 Whitney Biennial and the 2022 Venice Biennale, and they have participated in group exhibitions at the Barbican Centre, London; Brooklyn Museum; and Renaissance Society, Chicago. Their work is in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Studio Museum in Harlem, and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. They have taught at Harvard University, Williams College, and the Cooper Union, and they were an artist-in-residence at MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, and Light Work, and dean of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture from 2016 to 2021. In 2022, Pérez received the Abigail Cohen Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. Their work has appeared in publications, including Aperture, Art in America, Frieze, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. Elle Pérez: The Movement of Our Bodies, a collection of the artist’s writings, was published in 2025. Pérez is an assistant professor of graduate photography at the Yale School of Art, New Haven, Connecticut.