Kazuyo Sejima (born 1956) is a Japanese architect who leads her own office, Kazuyo Sejima & Associates, and, with Ryue Nishizawa, the firm SANAA. Born in Mito, Ibaraki, she studied at Japan Women's University, finishing a master's degree in 1981, and worked for Toyo Ito until 1987, when she set up her own office; one of her first hires was Nishizawa, and in 1995 the two founded SANAA in Tokyo. In 2010 she and Nishizawa received the Pritzker Prize, making her the second woman to win it, and that year she became the first woman to direct the architecture section of the Venice Biennale.
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The Gifu Kitagata Apartment (1998) in Gifu Prefecture is among her office's works of the 1990s. The New Museum in New York (2007), designed with Nishizawa as SANAA together with Gensler, opened on the Bowery in December 2007 as a seven-storey stack of white boxes, chosen because its flexibility suits the changing nature of contemporary art. The Sumida Hokusai Museum in Tokyo (2016), devoted to the ukiyo-e artist Katsushika Hokusai, is made of five interlocking volumes clad in reflective aluminium panels.
