Maya Lin Receives Honorary Degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins University

Congratulations to artist, designer, and environmentalist Maya Lin, who received honorary degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins University this week. Known for her critical engagement with notions of site and place through a multidisciplinary, ecologically minded practice, she is also a past recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Medal of the Arts.

As a 21-year-old undergraduate architecture student at Yale University, Lin created an unconventional and thought-provoking design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., a concept ultimately selected from some 1,400 competing entries. In the decades since that career-launching project, she has honed what leading architecture critic Martin Filler described as a "genius for transforming profound personal loss into a force for social cohesion." Her subsequent memorials include the Civil Rights Memorial at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama and the Women’s Table at Yale. In 2021, Lin presented her acclaimed public installation Ghost Forest, which comprised 49 towering Atlantic white cedar trees, in New York’s Madison Square Park, and she continues to work on her final, multi-platform memorial What is Missing?, raising awareness about habitat loss and biodiversity.