Jerry Daniel Opper, painter, printmaker, and commercial artist, was born in Cleveland, Ohio on September 5, 1924. His family moved to Los Angeles, California in 1933. Opper graduated from Hollywood High School and worked in the movie industry while attending the Chouinard Art Institute. After being drafted into the U.S. Army in 1942, he was briefly stationed in Colorado where he took advantage of his proximity to another art institute and enrolled in the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. Once he was discharged from the army, Opper returned to Los Angeles where he worked again in the film industry. In 1947, he moved to San Francisco and enrolled full time in the California School of Fine Arts and earned his diploma in June 1950.

Opper exhibited two lithographs at the Fourteenth Annual Drawing and Print Exhibition of the San Francisco Art Association in 1950 and his color lithograph Knave of Clubs was awarded the Artists' Council Prize the following year at the Fifteenth Annual Drawing and Print Exhibition. One of his color lithographs was included in the International Biennial of Contemporary Color Lithography at the Cincinnati Art Museum and another lithograph was included in the 1953 National Print Exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. Opper had a solo exhibitions of his work mounted at the Lucien Labaudt Gallery in San Francisco and the Montalvo Art Center in Saratoga, California. His work in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum and the Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Art.

Jerry Daniel Opper died in San Francisco, California on May 17, 2014.