--- description: Find out why Maya Lin is one of the 100 most influential people of 2022. title: Maya Lin: The 100 Most Influential People of 2022 image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd05c8a1aba2e9b3a/698a3212b3fce345150c9443/maya-lin-time100-2022.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 --- May 23, 2022 # Maya Lin by Celeste Ng  Mengwen Cao What I love about [Maya Lin](https://time.com/collection/firsts/4883284/maya-lin-firsts/ "undefined")’s work is that it layers what’s right in front of us with what might be forgotten or overlooked. Think of how the [Vietnam Veterans Memorial](https://time.com/6051363/vietnam-war-women-memorial/ "undefined") superimposes the reflection of your face with the names of the fallen: a reminder that the living and the dead, the past and the present, can never truly be disentangled. Sometimes her work reveals the literally hidden, like underground rivers or the dramatic contours of San Francisco Bay. But it also reveals inconvenient truths long ignored: the costs of environmental degradation, the ravages of extinction, our long national history of exclusion in civil rights and gender equality. [_Ghost Forest_](https://madisonsquarepark.org/art/exhibitions/maya-lin-ghost-forest/ "undefined") (2021) did both at once, puncturing Madison Square Park with an eerie glimpse into the future: the slow decimation of forests that’s already occurring around the globe. Lin has an uncanny power to make the invisible visible, shaking us out of complacency into a new state of awareness. _Ng is a novelist, most recently of_ Little Fires Everywhere ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"Article","@id":"https://time.com/collections/100-most-influential-people-2022/6177744/maya-lin/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/collections/100-most-influential-people-2022/6177744/maya-lin/"},"headline":"Maya Lin","datePublished":"2022-05-23T10:05:22.000Z","dateModified":"2026-07-21T07:21:57.066Z","description":"","url":"https://time.com/collections/100-most-influential-people-2022/6177744/maya-lin/","keywords":["TIME 100","franchise","TIME100 2022"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd05c8a1aba2e9b3a/698a3212b3fce345150c9443/maya-lin-time100-2022.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"TIME Staff","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/time-staff/"}],"creator":"TIME Staff","articleSection":"","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd05c8a1aba2e9b3a/698a3212b3fce345150c9443/maya-lin-time100-2022.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/collections/100-most-influential-people-2022/6177744/maya-lin/","name":"Maya Lin"}}]},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"FIRSTS Maya Lin","description":"Maya Lin is the FIRST woman to design a memorial on the National Mall.","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/Iol92UTl/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2017-09-06T17:24:03.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/Iol92UTl.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/collections/100-most-influential-people-2022/6177744/maya-lin/","duration":"PT2M54S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/collections/100-most-influential-people-2022/6177744/maya-lin/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}}] ```