Zaha Hadid studied at the AA from 1972 and was awarded the Diploma Prize in 1977. She joined OMA in the same year and started teaching in Dip 9 with her former tutors Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis, before leading her own unit until 1987. More recently, she held the Kenzo Tange Chair at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard; the Sullivan Chair of the University of Illinois; and is Professor at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna. She has also held several guest professorships. Best known for her seminal built works, her central concerns involve a simultaneous engagement in practice, teaching and research. Experimenting with new spatial concepts that intensify existing urban landscapes in the pursuit of a visionary aesthetic that encompasses all fields and scales of design, her work has been both widely published and the subject of several major exhibitions. NB: Projected text is sometimes too wavy to read.