Maya Lin

Maya Lin was born in Athens, Ohio, on 5 October 1959, into an academic and artistic family. Her father, Henry Huan Lin, came from a distinguished family of anti-Communist politicians and intellectuals in Beijing, China, and was a well-known ceramist and the former dean of fine arts at Ohio University. Her mother, Julia Chang Lin, is a professor of Asian literature at Ohio University. Maya was a reclusive child and spent much of her free time in solitary pastimes, such as hiking and reading. She also experimented with many artistic media, such as silversmithing and bronze casting. She was a good student and was co-valedictorian in her high school. After graduation she applied to and was accepted by Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

At the remarkably young age of 21 Maya Lin gained widespread attention as the winner of a national competition to design a monument commemorating--in what the sponsors of the competition specified be an apolitical way--America's longest and most politically controversial war. Her design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. featured a black granite wall inscribed with the names of the nearly 58,000 American servicemen and women who died in the Vietnam War. The monument has become one of the most visited sights in Washington and has earned a reputation as being a place of great emotion and healing. Other significant works by Lin include the Civil Rights Memorial (1989) in Montgomery, Alabama; the lower Manhattan home of the Museum for African Art; and The Women's Table at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.