Lin has said that she did not have many friends when growing up, stayed home a lot, loved to study, and loved school. While still in high school she took courses at Ohio University where she learned to cast bronze in the school's foundry. She graduated in 1977 from Athens High School in The Plains, Ohio, after which she attended Yale University where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in 1981 and a Master of Architecture in 1986.
According to Lin, she has been concerned with environmental issues since she was very young, and dedicated much of her time at Yale University to environmental activism. She attributes her interest in the environment to her upbringing in rural Ohio: the nearby Hopewell and Adena Native America burial mounds inspired her from an early age. Noting that much of her later work has focused on the relationship people have with their environment, as expressed in her earthworks, sculptures, and installations, Lin said, "I'm very much a product of the growing awareness about ecology and the environmental movement...I am very drawn to landscape, and my work is about finding a balance in the landscape, respecting nature not trying to dominate it. Even the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is an earthwork. All of my work is about slipping things in, inserting an order or a structuring, yet making an interface so that in the end, rather than a hierarchy, there is a balance and tension between the man-made and the natural."
According to the scholar Susette Min, Lin's work uncovers "hidden histories" to bring attention to landscapes and environments that would otherwise be inaccessible to viewers and "deploys the concept to discuss the inextricable relationship between nature and the built environment". Lin's focus on this relationship highlights the impact humanity has on the environment, and draws attention to issues such as global warming, endangered bodies of water, and animal extinction/endangerment. She has explored these issues in her recent memorial, called What Is Missing?
According to one commentator, Lin constructs her works to have a minimal effect on the environment by utilizing recycled and sustainable materials, by minimizing carbon emissions, and by attempting to avoid damaging the landscapes/ecosystems where she works.
In addition to her other activities as an environmentalist, Lin has served on the Natural Resources Defense Council board of trustees.
According to Lin, her intention was to create an opening or a wound in the earth to symbolize the pain caused by the war and its many casualties. "I imagined taking a knife and cutting into the earth, opening it up, and with the passage of time, that initial violence and pain would heal," she recalled.
Her winning design was initially controversial for several reasons: its minimalist design, her lack of professional experience, and her Asian ethnicity. Some objected to the exclusion of the surviving veterans' names, while others complained about the dark complexion of the granite, claiming that it expressed a negative attitude towards the Vietnam War. Lin defended her design before the US Congress, and a compromise was reached: Three Soldiers, a bronze depiction of a group of soldiers and an American flag were placed to the side of Lin's design.
Lin once said that if the competition had not been held "blind" (with designs submitted by name instead of number), she "never would have won" on account of her ethnicity. Her assertion is supported by the fact that she was harassed after her ethnicity was revealed, as when prominent businessman and later third-party presidential candidate Ross Perot called her an "egg roll."
Lin, who now owns and operates Maya Lin Studio in New York City, has designed numerous projects following the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, including the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama (1989) and the Wave Field outdoor installation at the University of Michigan (1995). Lin is represented by the Pace Gallery in New York City.
Maya Lin calls herself a "designer," rather than an "architect". Her vision and her focus are always on how space needs to be in the future, the balance and relationship with the nature and what it means to people. She has tried to focus less on how politics influences design and more on what emotions the space would create and what it would symbolize to the user. Her belief in a space being connected and the transition from inside to outside being fluid, coupled with what a space means, has led her to create some very memorable designs. She has also worked on sculptures and landscape installations, such as “Input” artwork at Ohio University. In doing so, Lin focuses on memorializing concepts of time periods instead of direct representations of figures, creating an abstract sculptures and installations.
Lin believes that art should be an act of any individual who is willing to say something that is new and not quite familiar. In her own words, Lin's work "originates from a simple desire to make people aware of their surroundings, not just the physical world but also the psychological world we live in." Lin describes her creative process as having a very important writing and verbal component. She first imagines an artwork verbally to understand its concepts and meanings. She believes that gathering ideas and information is especially vital in architecture, which focuses on humanity and life and requires a well-rounded mind. When a project comes her way, she tries to "understand the definition (of the site) in a verbal before finding the form to understand what a piece is conceptually and what its nature should be even before visiting the site". After she completely understands the definition of the site, Lin finalizes her designs by creating numerous renditions of her project in model form. In her historical memorials, such as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Women's Table, and the Civil Rights Memorial, Lin tries to focus on the chronological aspect of what she is memorializing. That theme is shown in her art memorializing the changing environment and in charting the depletion of bodies of water. Lin also explores themes of juxtaposing materials and a fusion of opposites: "I feel I exist on the boundaries. Somewhere between science and art, art and architecture, public and private, east and west.... I am always trying to find a balance between these opposing forces, finding the place where opposites meet... existing not on either side but on the line that divides."
Lin was married to Daniel Wolf (1955–2021), a photography dealer and collector. Her sister-in-law was the philanthropist Diane R. Wolf (1954–2008). She has homes in New York and rural Colorado, and is the mother of two daughters, India and Rachel. She has an older brother, the poet Tan Lin.
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"Presidential Lectures: Maya Lin". Prelectur.stanford.edu. November 5, 1989. Archived from the original on November 17, 2016. Retrieved April 25, 2012. http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/lin/
"Presidential Lectures: Maya Lin". Prelectur.stanford.edu. November 5, 1989. Archived from the original on November 17, 2016. Retrieved April 25, 2012. http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/lin/
"Presidential Lectures: Maya Lin". Prelectur.stanford.edu. November 5, 1989. Archived from the original on November 17, 2016. Retrieved April 25, 2012. http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/lin/
"Presidential Lectures: Maya Lin". Prelectur.stanford.edu. November 5, 1989. Archived from the original on November 17, 2016. Retrieved April 25, 2012. http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/lin/
"Presidential Lectures: Maya Lin". Prelectur.stanford.edu. November 5, 1989. Archived from the original on November 17, 2016. Retrieved April 25, 2012. http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/lin/
"Presidential Lectures: Maya Lin". Prelectur.stanford.edu. November 5, 1989. Archived from the original on November 17, 2016. Retrieved April 25, 2012. http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/lin/
"Presidential Lectures: Maya Lin". Prelectur.stanford.edu. November 5, 1989. Archived from the original on November 17, 2016. Retrieved April 25, 2012. http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/lin/
"Presidential Lectures: Maya Lin". Prelectur.stanford.edu. November 5, 1989. Archived from the original on November 17, 2016. Retrieved April 25, 2012. http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/lin/
"Presidential Lectures: Maya Lin". Prelectur.stanford.edu. November 5, 1989. Archived from the original on November 17, 2016. Retrieved April 25, 2012. http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/lin/
"Presidential Lectures: Maya Lin". Prelectur.stanford.edu. November 5, 1989. Archived from the original on November 17, 2016. Retrieved April 25, 2012. http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/lin/
"Presidential Lectures: Maya Lin". Prelectur.stanford.edu. November 5, 1989. Archived from the original on November 17, 2016. Retrieved April 25, 2012. http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/lin/
"Presidential Lectures: Maya Lin". Prelectur.stanford.edu. November 5, 1989. Archived from the original on November 17, 2016. Retrieved April 25, 2012. http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/lin/
"Presidential Lectures: Maya Lin". Prelectur.stanford.edu. November 5, 1989. Archived from the original on November 17, 2016. Retrieved April 25, 2012. http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/lin/
"Presidential Lectures: Maya Lin". Prelectur.stanford.edu. November 5, 1989. Archived from the original on November 17, 2016. Retrieved April 25, 2012. http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/lin/
"Presidential Lectures: Maya Lin". Prelectur.stanford.edu. November 5, 1989. Archived from the original on November 17, 2016. Retrieved April 25, 2012. http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/lin/
"Presidential Lectures: Maya Lin". Prelectur.stanford.edu. November 5, 1989. Archived from the original on November 17, 2016. Retrieved April 25, 2012. http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/lin/
"Presidential Lectures: Maya Lin". Prelectur.stanford.edu. November 5, 1989. Archived from the original on November 17, 2016. Retrieved April 25, 2012. http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/lin/
"Presidential Lectures: Maya Lin". Prelectur.stanford.edu. November 5, 1989. Archived from the original on November 17, 2016. Retrieved April 25, 2012. http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/lin/
Coelho, Courtney (April 22, 2015). "Under the Laurentide installed at BERT". News from Brown. Archived from the original on August 30, 2016. Retrieved April 26, 2015. https://news.brown.edu/articles/2015/04/laurentide
Stevens, Philip (March 19, 2021). "Maya Lin Completes New Neilson Library at Smith College in Massachusetts". designboom. Archived from the original on March 27, 2021. Retrieved March 30, 2021. https://www.designboom.com/architecture/maya-lin-new-neilson-library-smith-college-massachusetts-03-19-2021/
"Maya Lin: Ghost Forest". Madison Square Park Conservancy. Archived from the original on June 10, 2021. Retrieved June 10, 2021. https://madisonsquarepark.org/art/exhibitions/maya-lin-ghost-forest/