Maya Lin is the Next Speaker in the Mudd Lecture Series The architect and artist, who designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial when she was 21, will give a lecture on Sept. 17 in Keller Theatre.

Mudd Center for Ethics
September 4, 2026

Maya Lin, renowned architect and artist, will deliver a lecture at 5:15 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 17, in the Keller Theatre in the Lenfest Center for the Arts to kick off the Washington and Lee University Roger Mudd Center for Ethics’ series, “Memory, Mind and Morality.”

The lecture, which is free and open to the public, is titled “Memory, Monument and the Natural World.” The event is co-sponsored by the Lenfest Center, the Art Museum at W&L, the Department of Art History, the Department of Philosophy and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology.

Lin is a visionary artist who has created a remarkable and complex body of work, encompassing sculpture, architecture and memorials, that have explored our history and culture, our relationship with the natural environment and the passage of time.

In her talk, Lin will present several of her own works — including the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., and the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama — and reflect on how her deep concern for the environment has shaped her aesthetic vision. She will conclude by discussing her final memory work, “What Is Missing?,” a multi-sited memorial to the planet that confronts biodiversity loss and climate change.

Since she designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial as an undergraduate at Yale University, Lin has forged a unique and highly acclaimed path practicing in both architecture and art, while maintaining her memory works — five memorials that focus on the critical issues of our time and have been groundbreaking in their design.

Lin’s achievements have been widely recognized. Freida Lee Mock’s 1996 documentary, “Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision,” won the Academy Award for best documentary, and Lin has been profiled in TIME, The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker, among many other outlets. Lin was one of the youngest women to be inducted into the Women’s Hall of Fame and has been elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2009, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts, the nation’s highest honor of artistic excellence, and in 2016, President Barack Obama awarded her the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and praised her for a celebrated career in art and architecture and for creating a sacred place of healing in Washington, D.C.

For more information and a complete schedule of events, visit the Mudd Center for Ethics’ series webpage.

The Mudd Center was established in 2010 through a gift to the university from award-winning journalist Roger Mudd, a 1950 graduate of W&L. By facilitating collaboration across traditional institutional boundaries, the center aims to encourage a multidisciplinary perspective on ethics informed by both theory and practice. Previous Mudd Center lecture series themes have included “Global Ethics in the 21st Century: Challenges and Opportunities,” “Race and Justice in America,” “The Ethics of Citizenship,” “Markets and Morals,” “Equality and Difference,” “The Ethics of Identity,” “The Ethics of Technology,” “Daily Ethics: How Individual Choices and Habits Express Our Values and Shape Our World, “Beneficence: Practicing and Ethics of Care,” “The Ethics of Design,” “How We Live and Die: Stories, Values and Communities” and “Taking Place: Land Use and Environmental Ethics.”