Maya Lin

Humanitas Visiting Professorship in Contemporary Art (2014-2015)

The Humanitas Visiting Professorship in Contemporary Art is a high-profile initiative at the University of Oxford dedicated to promoting the study of contemporary art through its foremost practicing artists. Ambitious in its scope, the Visiting Professorships brings diverse artists of critical acclaim to the University Oxford, where the initiative is recognised as one of the University’s most important channels for engagement with contemporary art.

The initiative enjoys a special relationship with the Humanitas Visiting Professorship in Museums, Galleries and Libraries, often overlapping to provide a dynamic forum for exchange about arts and culture in modern society.

The Visiting Professorship in Contemporary Art has been made possible by the generous support of Ivorypress and is hosted by Magdalene College, Oxford.

Maya Lin is an American designer and artist who is known for her work in sculpture and landscape art.

Maya Lin came to fame as the designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. and has gone on to pursue a remarkable career in art and architecture, while continuing her interest in memorial.

Lin, who now owns and operates Maya Lin Studio in New York City, went on to design other structures, including the Civil Rights Memorial in Alabama (1989) and the Wave Field at the University of Michigan (1995). In 2009, Lin was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama.

Lin is now at work on what she calls “her final memorial,” the What Is Missing? Foundation, to commemorate the biodiversity that has been lost in the planet’s sixth mass extinction. What Is Missing? aims to raise awareness about the loss of biodiversity and natural habitats by utilizing sound, media, science, and art for temporary installations and a web-based project. What Is Missing? exists not in one specific site, but in many forms and in many places simultaneously.