Born in 1950 in Baghdad, Iraq, Zaha was raised in a prominent Mosulite family who were engaged in politics, industry and the arts. Her father, Mohammed Hadid, was a leading economist and a founding member of Iraq’s National Democratic Party, while her mother, Wajiha Al-Sabunji, was an artist. Zaha grew up in Baghdad’s Al-Sa'adoun neighbourhood—in one of the city’s first Bauhaus-inspired homes—and attended a progressive convent school where French, Iraqi and British nuns championed girls' education and invited university science professors to teach. Visits to historic landmarks in her homeland and abroad, including the ancient cities of Babylon and Samarra, and the Córdoba Mosque-Cathedral in Spain, inspired her interest in architecture and landscape from an early age. 

Zaha’s childhood also coincided with a period of intense political and cultural change as post-independence Iraq developed into a modern state. During this time, key Arab and international figures in modern architecture, including Rifat Chadirji, Mohamed Makiya, Gio Ponti, Frank Lloyd Wright and Walter Gropius, were invited to design buildings, monuments and proposals for the Iraqi capital.

From 1985, Zaha rented Studio 9 in a former Victorian school building at 10 Bowling Green Lane in Clerkenwell, London, for her office; eventually, Zaha Hadid Architects would occupy the entire building complex. Her first completed commission followed soon afterwards: an interior suite for a mid-century apartment on London’s Cathcart Road, for which Zaha developed a design language full of flexibility and dynamism. Speculative paintings and sculptural models also remained at the forefront of the studio’s creative output, in which experiments with layering, transparency and multi-perspectival projection served as tools for architectural investigation.These were published and exhibited widely during the first decade of Zaha’s career, including at MoMA’s groundbreaking Deconstructivist Architecture show in 1988. 

By the early 1990s, commissions were surging, with Zaha receiving particular interest from developers in Germany, Japan and the United Arab Emirates. Her first permanent buildings were completed in 1993: IBA Housing, a social housing block for women in Berlin designed for the 1987 International Building Exhibition (though Zaha largely withdrew from the project before its completion), and Vitra Fire Station in Weil am Rhein, Germany, commissioned by Rolf Fehlbaum, Managing Director and CEO of Vitra. With the buildability of her ideas confirmed in built form, the 1990s marked Zaha’s transition from a supposed “paper architect” to an in-demand creator of radical, physical architecture.

However, Zaha’s success was not without its setbacks. Following the Vitra commission, her office triumphed in the highly publicised competition for the Cardiff Bay Opera House  in Wales, UK, in 1994. Despite winning first prize, she was obliged to re-compete for the project several times due to political opposition, media backlash and a lack of funding. The project was controversially never realised. Despite the difficulties, these years were an intense period of research, experimentation and discovery for her practice, culminating in the 1997 commission to design the new Contemporary Arts Centre in Cincinnati, USA, which was completed to critical acclaim in 2003.

A period of intense international projects followed. Commissions included Bergisel Ski Jump  (1999-2002), Innsbruck, Austria; Phaeno Science Center  (2000-2005), Wolfsburg, Germany; Sheikh Zayed Bridge (1997-2010), Abu Dhabi, UAE; the Evelyn Grace Academy  (2006-2010), London, UK; MAXXI Museum  (1998-2009), Rome, Italy; London Aquatics Centre  (2005-2011/14), London, UK; Heydar Aliyev Centre  (2007-2012), Baku, Azerbaijan; and Dongdaemun Design Plaza  (2007-2014), Seoul, South Korea. Moving from meticulous drawing, painting and modelmaking to advanced digital design methods, her team’s commitment to innovation accelerated the development of increasingly complex geometries. Collaboration with the industry’s best engineers and consultants, including Arup and AKT II, brought Zaha Hadid Architects’ groundbreaking designs to fruition, from jigsaw-like compositions of suspended volumes and voids to extreme cantilevers and parametric envelopes that flowed seamlessly into the landscape.

Multidisciplinary from the outset, Zaha was designing, from the 1980s, everything from furniture and interiors to pavilions, collaborating with emerging and established design manufacturers on everything from jewellery and tableware to fashion and exhibition design. Fusing her love for architecture, design and fashion, she set up Zaha Hadid Design in 2006, and in the ensuing years, produced memorable objects and accessories for brands including Melissa, Adidas, Sawaya & Moroni, Alessi, Louis Vuitton and Bulgari.

Zaha also maintained a profound commitment to education throughout her career. Beyond her close involvement with the Architectural Association, she held chairs and professorships at universities including Columbia, Harvard, Yale and the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria. Her contribution to architecture and the arts was recognised during her lifetime with numerous awards and honours. She was the first woman to win the architecture profession’s highest honour, the Pritzker Prize, in 2004 and the first individual woman to receive the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in recognition of her lifetime’s work in 2015. She broke new ground as the first back-to-back recipient of the RIBA Stirling Prize in 2010 and 2011, which recognised MAXXI and the Evelyn Grace Academy as the greatest contributions to the evolution of architecture in their respective years. In the United Kingdom, she was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2002 for her services to architecture, and a Dame in 2012.