Rachel Whiteread was born in 1963 in London. She studied painting at Brighton Polytechnic from 1982-85 and sculpture at the Slade School of Art, London, from 1985-87. In 1993 Whiteread created one of her most controversial and poignant works, House, a concrete cast of the interior of a condemned terraced house in the East End of London, for which she was awarded the Turner Prize in the same year. In 1997 she represented Britain at the Venice Biennale. Commissions have included Water Tower for New York City in 1994-98, the Holocaust Memorial in Vienna, completed in 2000, and the Fourth Plinth Project in Trafalgar Square in 2001. She was awarded a CBE in 2005.