The Vietnam War Memorial Designer was Maya Lin, an American architect and artist. She was born in Athens, Ohio in 1959 and graduated from Yale University in 1981. Her design for the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington D.C. was chosen from over 1, 400 submissions in a 1981 competition. The memorial consists of two black granite walls inscribed with the names of the 58, 000 Americans who died in the war. It has become one of the most visited sites in the United States.