Marya Lilien
Marya Lilien, also Maria Lilien-Czarnecka (March 27, 1900 or 1901 – January 12, 1998) was a Polish architect, university professor and the first woman architect to apprentice under Frank Lloyd Wright. She created and headed the Department of Interior Design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Early life and education Marya Lilien was born on March 27, 1900 or 1901, in Lviv, in a Polish-Jewish family of Adolf Lilien (1863–1911) and Emma née Nierenstein (1867–1934). Her siblings were the economist, lawyer and diplomat Artur Lilien-Brzozdowiecki and the singer Klara Janina Bloomfield (1893–1965). Marya completed studies in architecture at the Lviv Polytechnic, where she studied descriptive geometry under Kazimierz Bartel. She was among the first women to graduate from the university. Career Lilien belonged to the young artistic circles of Lviv. In the first half of the 1930s she worked as an architect in Warsaw and Lviv, then traveled to the US in 1935. Upon being invited by Frank Lloyd Wright, who offered her a scholarship, she joined the Taliesin studio and became the first woman apprentice under Wright. Lilien returned to Poland in the late 1930s. At the start of World War II she was in Lviv,