Elizabeth “Liz” Diller

Elizabeth “Liz” Diller is a Polish architect born June 17, 1954 in Łódź, Poland’s third largest city. When she was 6, Diller and her family emigrated to the United States. Film and multimedia installations fascinated her, so she studied art at the Cooper Union School of Architecture in New York City, graduating in 1955 with a bachelor’s degree in architecture.

Diller and her husband Ricardo Scofidio co-own Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R), an interdisciplinary design studio that combines mixed media arts, architecture, and the performing arts, which opened in 1979. The team has been creating projects since 2002. Some of their work involve the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, buildings at Brown University and Stanford University, the Broad Museum in Los Angeles, and the Blur in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland.

Diller’s decades of success has resulted in countless awards for her contributions to architecture. She was named one of the Time 100 Most Influential People in 2018 for a second time–once being the only architect on the list. In 2019, she was awarded the Jane Drew Prize, and that same year she won the Royal Academy (RA) of Arts Prize. Most recently, in 2022, she was awarded the Wolf Prize for Arts-Architecture.