Rebeca
Mendez

Rebeca Méndez is an artist, designer, and professor and chair at UCLA, Design Media Arts, where she is founder and director of the CounterForce Lab, a research and fieldwork studio for art, design and environment. Her research and practice investigates design and media art in public space, critical approaches to public identities and landscape, and artistic projects based on field investigation methods. Méndez’s diverse works are driven by her interest in perception and embodied experience and they develop within science, design and art through immersive installations, sound, video, photography, book arts, and drawing, with focus on post-humanism, eco-feminism, anthropocene and environmental justice. Since 1996, she’s led Rebeca Méndez Studio in Los Angeles and has received significant recognition including an honorary doctorate from Art Center College of Design (2019), The Sally and Don Lucas Artists Residency Program, Montalvo Arts Center, Saratoga, California (2019-22); inclusion into the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2019), inclusion in the One Club Creative Hall of Fame (2017); 2017 Medal of AIGA, and the 2012 National Design Award in Communication Design. Her diverse works have been exhibited widely in significant institutions including solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Hammer Museum, Nevada Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Oaxaca, Mexico, and group exhibitions at the 55th Venice Biennial, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, El Paso Museum of Art, and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. Her work was selected to premiere in the 2019 Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival. Méndez is known for her career-long commitment to ‘design and art as a social force,’ and was awarded the ‘2016 Vision Over Violence Humanitarian Award,’ by Peace Over Violence, Los Angeles. Méndez was guest curator at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in ‘Rebeca Méndez Selects’ 2018–19, reviewed in The New Yorker magazine. She served as co-chair for the 2018 National Design Awards, faculty committee for the Pritzker Emerging Environmental Genius Award, 2017, 2018 and 2019, keynote speaker at the AIGA Conference 2019 / Design Educators, and speaker, member of the steering committee and co-curator of the 2019 Aspen Ideas Festival. Her interests and initiatives are a bridge between art, design and science, and demonstrate a commitment to the environment and a sustainable future.