The University of Florida is designing and building the Canarias InfraRed Camera Experiment (CIRCE) – a near-infrared open-use guest instrument for the Gran Telescopio Canarias 10.4-meter telescope. CIRCE is an all-reflective 1-2.5 m imager with a 3.4x3.4-arcminute field-of-view, offering built-in upgrade paths for narrow-band imaging, low- and moderate-resolution grism spectroscopy and imaging polarimetry. The combination of CIRCE and GTC will produce one of the most powerful near-infrared scientific tools in the world, enabling a broad range of investigations from microquasars to stellar populations to high-redshift galaxy evolution. In this paper, we review the current status of CIRCE, as well as the key instrumental features and the science it will enable on GTC.