Elizabeth Diller

Elizabeth Diller is a visionary. She imagines things the rest of us have to see to believe. She can turn a metaphor into brick and mortar.

For the Broad, Liz and the Diller Scofidio + Renfro team had a tricky assignment: build a museum that is iconic, but that doesn’t clash with Disney Hall across the street. They called their design “the veil and the vault.” The veil—a white, porous overlay—brings diffused light in to meet the art. And the vault, hovering within the building, its contents visible through plate-glass windows, shows visitors the great potential of our collection to keep offering more art and ideas. We thought this was a brilliant concept.

Maybe it’s because she’s a woman in a male-dominated field, or because she was originally a conceptual artist—along with her partner in art, architecture and life, Ric Scofidio—but whatever the reason, Liz sees opportunities where others see challenges. She can do the impossible.

Broad, an entrepreneur and philanthropist, opened his namesake museum in Los Angeles in 2015