Speaker Bio

Maya Lin (born 1959 Athens, OH) creates highly acclaimed work encompassing large scale environmental installations, intimate studio artworks, architectural works, and memorials. Her artwork interprets the world through a twenty-first century lens, utilizing technological methods to study and visualize the natural environment. Through sculpture and drawing, Lin merges rational order with notions of beauty and the transcendental.

Throughout her career Maya Lin has maintained a careful balance between art and architecture, having virtually redefined the idea of the monument with her widely visited Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in 1982. She has since gone on to create a remarkable body of work that encompasses intimate studio artworks, architectural works, large-scale site-specific installations such as 11 Minute Line in Wanas, Sweden, and Storm King Wavefield in Mountainville, New York, and further memorials including the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, and The Women’s Table at Yale University.

Lin’s work has been shown in solo and group shows throughout the United States and abroad, including the retrospective Systematic Landscapes which travelled from 2006 through 2009 to the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; Arts Club of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; De Young Museum, San Francisco; and Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Her work has been shown at the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Dayton Art Institute and this summer at the Nevada Museum of Art and Parrish Art Museum, New York. Lin is the recipient of the 6th Annual Art/Act Award and is showing at the David Brower Center in Berkeley until February 4, 2015.

Lin’s current projects include an earthwork in New Zealand; a medical research center in Cambridge, Massachusetts; a park in Newport, Rhode Island; and the Confluence Project, a multi-sited installation that spans the Columbia River system in the Pacific Northwest, intertwining the history of Lewis and Clark with the history of the Native American Tribes that inhabit those regions. A committed environmentalist, Lin’s dedication to the natural world can be found in her most recent memorial, What is Missing?, a multi-sited artwork that raises awareness about the current crisis surrounding biodiversity and habitat loss.

In her large-scale environmental artworks, Lin has consistently explored how we experience and relate to the landscape. She has made works that merge seamlessly with the terrain, blurring the boundaries between two- and three-dimensional space and setting up a systematic ordering of the land that is tied to history, time, science, and language.

Maya Lin graduated cum laude from Yale University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1981. She went on to earn her Master of Architecture degree from Yale in 1986, and has maintained a professional studio in New York City since then. Lin is the recipient of numerous prizes and awards, including the 2009 National Medal of Arts, the Presidential Design Award, the Mayor’s Award for Arts and Culture, a National Endowment for the Arts artist award, the William A. Beroudy Resident in Architecture fellowship from the American Academy in Rome, the Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an AIA Honor Award, the Finn Juhl Prize, and honorary doctorates from Yale and Harvard Universities, and William and Smith Colleges, among others.

Lin serves on the Board of Trustees of the Museum of Chinese in America, the Bloomberg Family Foundation, and the What is Missing? Foundation, which she founded. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 2005.

Maya Lin has been represented by Pace Gallery since 2008.