Martha Thorne is currently Dean of IE School of Architecture and Design and is also the Executive Director of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, a position she has held since 2005.

From 1996 through 2005, she served as Associate Curator of the Department of Architecture at The Art Institute of Chicago. Her work during her tenure at the museum involved curating many exhibitions, developing publications, and participating in the ground-breaking study on collecting, archiving, and exhibiting digitally created design materials. She is the co-author of the books Masterpieces of Chicago Architecture and Skyscrapers: The New Millennium, editor and author for The Pritzker Architecture Prize: The First Twenty Years, and author of numerous articles for architectural journals and encyclopaedias. She regularly serves on international competition juries. She was a trustee of the Graham Foundation for Architecture and the Fine Arts and on the Board of Directors of the International Archive of Women in Architecture.

Martha Thorne received a Master of City Planning degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Urban Affairs from the State University of New York at Buffalo. She undertook additional studies at the London School of Economics.

Benedetta Tagliabue studied architecture at the Istituto di Architettura di Venezia (IUAV) and is currently director of the international architecture firm Miralles Tagliabue EMBT, founded in 1994 in collaboration with Enric Miralles, based in Barcelona and since 2010 in Shanghai.

Among her most notable built projects are the Edinburgh Parliament, Diagonal Mar Park, the Santa Caterina Market in Barcelona, Campus Universitario de Vigo, and the Spanish Pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo which was awarded the prestigious RIBA International “Best International Building of 2011” award. Current studio projects include The Business School of Fudan University in Shanghai, office towers in Taiwan and Taichung, public spaces of HafenCity in Hamburg, Germany, and the metro station Clichy-Montfermeil in Paris, France.

Her studio works across the areas of architecture, design of public spaces, rehabilitation, interior and industrial design. Her poetic architecture, always attentive to its context, has won international awards in the fields of public space and design.

As an academic, she has been a visiting professor at Harvard University, Columbia University and Barcelona ETSAB, lecturing regularly at architecture forums and universities, and takes part in award juries around the world, e.g. the Princesa de Asturias awards and the Pritzker Prize juries.

In 2004 she received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Edinburgh Napier University, Scotland. She received the 2013 RIBA Jencks Award, which is given annually to an individual or practice that has recently made a major contribution internationally to both the theory and practice of architecture.

She is also the director of the Enric Miralles Foundation, whose goal is to promote experimental architecture in the spirit of her late husband and partner Enric Miralles.