Daniel Libeskind - Personal Life

Personal Life

Born in Łódź, Poland on May 12, 1946, Libeskind was the second child of Dora and Nachman Libeskind, both Polish Jews and Holocaust survivors.

As a young child, Libeskind learned to play the accordion and quickly became a virtuoso, performing on Polish television in 1953. He won a prestigious America Israel Cultural Foundation scholarship in 1959 and played alongside a young Itzhak Perlman. That summer, the Libeskinds moved to New York City on one of the last immigrant boats to the United States.

In New York, Libeskind lived in the Amalgamated Housing Cooperative in the northwest Bronx, a union-sponsored, middle-income cooperative development. He attended the Bronx High School of Science. The print shop where his father worked was on Stone Street in lower Manhattan, and Libeskind watched the original World Trade Center being built in the 1960s.

Libeskind became a United States citizen in 1965. In 1970, he received his professional architectural degree from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art; he received a postgraduate degree in History and Theory of Architecture at the School of Comparative Studies at the University of Essex in 1972.

In 1968, Libeskind briefly worked as an apprentice to architect Richard Meier. In 1972, he was hired to work at Peter Eisenman's New York Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, but he quit almost immediately.

Daniel Libeskind met Nina Lewis, his future wife and business partner, at the Bundist-run Camp Hemshekh in upstate New York in 1966. They married a few years later and, instead of a traditional honeymoon, traveled across the United States visiting Frank Lloyd Wright buildings on a Cooper Union fellowship.

Since then, Libeskind has lived, among other places, in New York, Toronto, Michigan, Italy, Germany, and Los Angeles, and has taught at numerous universities across the world, including the University of Kentucky, Yale University, and the University of Pennsylvania. Since 2007, Libeskind is visiting professor at the Leuphana University Lueneburg, Germany. He is both a U.S. and Israeli citizen.

Nina and Daniel Libeskind have three children, Lev, Noam and Rachel.