Maya Lin

When a contest was announced for the design of a new memorial for veterans of the Vietnam War, Maya Lin took a chance and entered. She was still an undergraduate at Yale University. In 1981, at the age of only 21, she received the amazing news that she had won the opportunity to create a work of public art that would last for generations.

Lin is the daughter of immigrants. Both her parents fled China in the late 1940s and settled in Ohio. Her father was a ceramics artist and her mother is a poet and retired literature professor, so Lin was constantly reminded of the importance of the arts. While she was in high school, she took some classes in bronze casting – a form of metal sculpture – at Ohio University. She has both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in architecture from Yale.