Maya Lin, American architect, artist and designer, was born on October 5, 1959 in Athens, Ohio. Maya comes from a small lineage of artists of all sorts. Her father, Henry Lin, was a ceramist and former dean of Ohio University College of Fine Arts. Her mother, was a literature professor at Ohio University and is a poet. Maya’s mother is also the niece of Lin Huiyin, who is an American educated poet and artist and is also said to be the first female architect in modern China. Maya attended Yale University to earn her Bachelor of Arts (1981) and Master of Architect (1986) degrees. While an undergraduate at Yale University, Maya submitted a design for the Vietnam War Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C, to which her entry was picked. The design she laid out was an angled wall with one end pointing to the Lincoln Memorial and one end at the Washington Memorial. Her design was to give an “open wound” in the earth to represent the gravity of fallen soldiers during the war. Although it was picked, she had received a bunch of controversial backlash because the design was not the “standard” memorial wall. Today, the wall holds 58,318 names of fallen soldiers.
Vietnam War Memorial aerial view of the “open wound” shape 
Vietnam Memorial Wall; made from black granite 
Maya Lin Vietnam War Memorial Draft
After Maya graduated Yale, she designed numerous peojects, some of which include the Civil Rights Memorial (1989) in Montgomery, Alabama and the “Wave Field” installation at the University of Michigan (1995).
“Wave Field” at University of Michigan 
Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, AL
In 2015, Lin finishes and opens her installation of “Folding The Chesapeake” in the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian Museum. The art is a large scale replica of the Chesapeake Bay but it is folding and curved along the walls of the room. The installation is made of 54,000 industrial fiberglass marbles to create the water-like effect. She got this idea from opening a box of marbles her dad had brought home when she was 8, saying the marbles looked like opening a box of water.
