Small business owner, educator, corporate creative director and innovator Rebeca Méndez will speak about her professional career and her work as a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she leads the Brand Lab. Participants in the Brand Lab study how organizations are defined by their public identities, and how those identities can be strategized and designed. Through her business, Rebeca Méndez Communication Design (RCMD), Méndez has collaborated with video artist Bill Viola, architect Thom Mayne of Morphosis and film director Mike Figgis. RMCD's clients include the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, the Guggenheim Berlin, the Getty Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. As creative director of the Brand Integration Group at Ogilvy & Mather, NY and Los Angeles (1999-2003), Méndez led global brand identity projects for clients such as IBM, Motorola, BP (British Petroleum), AT&T Wireless and Mattel.

Méndez was born and raised in Mexico City and received her BFA (1984) in Communication Design and her MFA (1996) in digital art from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA. Her work has been exhibited and collected by institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Museo Jose Luis Cuevas in Mexico City, and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York. She lectures nationally and internationally and her work has been subject of numerous publications and exhibitions such as Clean New World: Culture, Politics and Graphic Design, 2002; Women Designers in The USA, 1900-2000; Diversity and Difference, 2001; The National Design Triennial: Design Culture Now, 2000, and Mixing Messages: Graphic Design in Contemporary Culture, 1996.