Orientational photorefractive Bragg diffraction is observed in high- and low-molar-mass liquid crystal mixtures doped with fullerene(C60).These novel materials are in a nematic phase without phase separating. In the functionalized materials, we observe a high two-beam coupling gain coefficient(&Ggr;=75 cm−1)with a low applied field of 4 V/&mgr;m, low total losses (32 cm−1including scattering, reflection, and absorption), a high diffraction efficiency (9&percent;), and response time of 200 ms. ©1998 American Institute of Physics.