The Real Deal New York

Elizabeth Diller, who goes by Liz, is a New York City-based architect and one of the two founding partners of Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Diller, who was born in Poland in 1954 to Polish-Jewish parents and emigrated with them as a child, is married to Ricardo Scofidio, with whom she co-founded their firm in 1979. She met Scofidio when she was a student and he was a professor at Cooper Union. Their firm spent decades designing conceptual art and sets for dance performances, rather than brick-and-mortar buildings, but have won a number of high profile commissions in recent years. Since 1991, Diller has been teaching architecture at Princeton University and has taught at Cooper Union and Harvard University and in 1999, Diller and Scofidio won a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, known as a “genius grant”. Diller received a BA from the Cooper Union School of Architecture in 1979. –MK