Michael Maltzan was born in 1959 in Levittown, on Long Island, New York. He holds both a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Bachelor of Architecture from Rhode Island School of Design, where he received the Henry Adams AIA Scholastic Gold Medal. He received a Master of Architecture degree with a Letter of Distinction from Harvard University in 1988.

In the decade since founding Michael Maltzan Architecture, Inc., Michael Maltzan has created a practice which engages the increasingly complex reality of urbanization and information-driven culture. Building on his experiences as a child in Levittown and his background in the arts, his work endeavors to synthesize the ambiguity of our contemporary world through an architecture that is both catalyst for new experiences and infused with an optimism for its role as an agent for change. This work, through projects including the Mark Taper Forum/Inner-City Arts, Harvard-Westlake School's Feldman-Horn Center for the Arts, MoMA QNS, Kidspace Children's Museum, UCLA Hammer Museum's Billy Wilder Theater, Fresno Metropolitan Museum, Sonoma County Museum, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's new Administration Building and Conference Center, charts a new trajectory for Modernism and the public realm.