Elsa Maria Ribbing, born in Stockholm, Sweden 1934, is the granddaughter of Gustaf Ribbing, daughter of Dag Ribbing and his wife Brita, née Snellman.
During the 1950s, she trained as an interior architect at the Higher School of Art and Design (Konstfack) in Stockholm, and after graduating in 1958, she worked for ten years at various architectural firms in Stockholm.
Between 1970-1975, she was employed by the government of the British Virgin Islands as a collaborator in Tortola’s Town and Country Planning Office. Between 1976-1984 she lived in Botswana where she remotely studied development country knowledge, political science, economics, and environmental science at Uppsala University.
Back in Sweden in the mid-1980s, she ran an interior design office together with a colleague in Stockholm until 1992, after which she continued to take on smaller architectural assignments as a freelancer throughout the 1990s.
She also conducted several inventories of Älgö for Nacka Municipality, which resulted in a book she published on her own initiative in 2015 about the island in the Stockholm Archipelago, “Älgö – en skärgårdsö i förvandling”.
She is the mother of three children and grandmother of four.
