Yasmeen Lari

In a country not historically known for diverse opportunities for women, Yasmeen Lari has carved out an astonishingly broad and deep career. Educated at the School of Architecture at Oxford Brookes, she returned to her native country of Pakistan in 1963 to discover, with some surprise, that she had inadvertently become the country’s first female architect. Inspired by the challenges inherent to her homeland—which she characterizes as "an industrially less-developed country, [with] high levels of illiteracy and poverty, booming urban centers, and, more recently, multiple major natural disasters," she has spent the past half century finding ways to serve local communities with groundbreaking vision.