Tatiana Bilbao is well-known as an important international architect, not only for the expressiveness of her architecture but for her promotion of the discipline as a tool for improving society and the environment.
Born in Mexico City in 1972, her career was launched when she graduated in Architecture and Urbanism from Universidad Iberoamericana in 1996 and her graduate thesis was named the best of the year. In 1998 she became Advisor for Urban Projects and Urban Residential Construction of the Mexico City Development Department. She founded her own studio, Tatiana Bilbao Estudio, in Mexico City in 2004, developing projects in China and Europe, as well as in Mexico. In 2007 she was awarded Design Vanguard as one of the top ten emerging firms of the year by Architectural Record, and the Architecture League in New York named her as Emerging Voice in 2010. The Centre Pompidou added her three of her projects to their permanent collection in 2010, and her work is also included in the collections of the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. She received the CEMEX Building Award in 2011 and 2013, and the Kunstpries Berlin in 2012.
In 2014 she received the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture by the LOCUS Foundation, Cité de l´Architecture of Paris and the patronage of UNESCO.
Her work centers on developing architectural projects that respond to the social climate. For over ten years, Bilbao has been participating in an important multidisciplinary project in the city of Culiacán, the capital of the state of Sinaloa, in Mexico, a small city with complex social and political issues. The Jardín Botánico Culiacán (Culiacán Botanical Garden) is a public space, based on an extensive private contemporary art collection, that became an ambitious project to develop a cultural environment. One of her first projects and still ongoing, the evolving Botanical Garden complex is an democratic space that offers possibilities for all.
In addition to her studio practice, she has also pursued an academic career, including teaching design at the Universidad Iberoamericana and at Andres Bello University in Santiago, Chile.  She was the Louis Kahn Visiting Professor at Yale School of Architecture in the spring 2015. In spring 2016, she was named Cullinan Visiting Professor at Rice School of Architecture and became Adjunct Associate Professor of Architecture at Columbia GSAPP that fall. In spring 2017, she was named the Norman R. Foster Professor of Architectural Design at Yale University School of Architecture.