Faculty Presentation: Catherine Opie, Andrea Lawlor
and Celeste Lecesne
Monday, June 23, 2025
5-7 PM
Join us for a summer faculty artist talk and reading with photographer Catherine Opie, and writer Andrea Lawlor, and writer and actor Celeste Lecesne.
About Our Speakers
Catherine Opie (b. 1961) is one of the most important photographers of her generation. Her subjects have included early seminal portraits of the LGBTQ+ community, the architecture of Los Angeles’ freeway system, mansions in Beverly Hills, Midwestern icehouses, high school football players, California surfers, and abstract landscapes of National Parks, among others. She was a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow recipient and the Robert Mapplethorpe Resident in Photography at the American Academy in Rome for 2021. She has exhibited at international venues such as Guggenheim Museum in New York, The Photographer’s Gallery in London, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark. Opie was a professor of photography at UCLA for 25 years. She lives and works in Los Angeles.
Andrea Lawlor is the author of a chapbook, Position Papers (Factory Hollow Press, 2016), and a novel, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl (Rescue Press, 2017; Vintage, 2019; Picador UK, 2019). Their stories, essays, and poems have appeared in publications such as Ploughshares, The Brooklyn Rail, jubilat, and The New York Times. They are the recipient of a Whiting Award for Fiction, as well as fellowships from Lambda Literary, Radar Labs, the Ucross Foundation, and Macdowell Colony. They are an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Mount Holyoke College, and live in Western Massachusetts.
Celeste Lecesne (he/they) wrote the short film Trevor, which won an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short, and is co-founder of The Trevor Project. He adapted Armistead Maupin’s Further Tales of The City for Showtime, was a writer on the series Will & Grace and has written three novels for young adults. As an actor, Celeste has appeared on TV, in film, on and Off Broadway, and is best known for his award-winning solo shows. He is the co-founder of The Future Perfect Project, a national arts initiative for LGBTQ+ youth, and he received a Guggenheim Fellowship Award in 2023.
The Fine Arts Work Center is committed to making its events and services inclusive and accessible for everyone. If you need any accommodations to fully participate, please contact our Accessibility Coordinator, Susan Blood, at 508-487-9960, extension 106.
Both the Stanley Kunitz Common Room and the Hudson D. Walker Gallery meet ADA accessibility standards. If you need help accessing these spaces, please call us at 508-487-9960 ext. 101 before your visit.
This program is supported in part by the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod, Mass Cultural Council, Mass Development, and Provincetown Tourism Fund, and Provincetown Cultural Council, a local agency which is supported by the Mass Cultural Council, a state agency.
