Maya Lin, a Chinese American, was born in Athens, Ohio in 1959. Her parents immigrated to the United States from China in 1949 and settled in Ohio in 1958, one year before Maya Lin was born. Her father, Henry Huan Lin, was a ceramist and former dean of the school of Art at Ohio University, and her mother, a poetess, was a professor of English Literature at Ohio University. She is the niece of Huiyin Lin, a well-known Chinese poetess, artist, and first female architect in China, who helped design the Chinese National Emblem, and People's Hero Monument in Tiananmen Square. Lin studied at Yale University, where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1981 and a Master of Architect degree in 1986. She has also been awarded honorary doctorate degrees from Yale and Harvard University.

Lin's name first became familiar in 1980 when, as a 21 -year-old senior architecture major at Yale, she won first prize in the contest to design a Vietnam Veterans Memorial for the northwest comer of the Mall in Washington, D.C.. Rejecting the conventional heroics of military monuments, Lin's poignant，contemplative, apolitical design was a revelation.

Lin has created a dozen major works across the nation, including the Peace Chapel at Pennsylvania's Juniata College, the "Women's Table" at Yale University and the Langston Hughes Library (co-designed with others) in Clinton, Tennessee. "The Wave Field" at the College of Engineering in University of Michigan, is a pure earth sculpture, made entirely of soil covered with grass, undulating in waves six feet high. In addition, Maya Lin has also executed architectural projects for the Rockefeller Foundation and the new Federal Courthouse in Manhattan.

Maya Lin was awarded a 2009 National Medal of Arts. And on February 25, 2010，at the National Medal of Arts ceremonies which was held at the East wing of the White House, Lin was again among the honorees. President Obama granted this honor for her in person for "her profound work as an architect, artist and environmentalist".